MAX EASTMAN GREAT COMPANIONS

$4.75
MAX EASTMAN

Great Companions

CRITICAL MEMOIRS OF
SOME FAMOUS FRIENDS

Illustrated with photographs

In these warm a^cd^iai pages, Max
Eastman appraises the ideas and char
acter, as well as the personal history,
of twelve of the greatest people of his
time:

ALBERT EINSTEIN, with whom Mr.
Eastman enjoyed several philosophical
"arguments" in Princeton.

ERNEST HEMINGWAY, whose notori
ous tussle with the author in a New
York editorial office is here for the
first time fully described.

E. W. SCRIPPS, the self-made news
paper magnate and recluse.

EDNA MILLAY, who was an intimate
friend.

PABLO CASALS, the humanist and
musician.

LEON TROTSKY, the flinty and bril
liant revolutionist.

SIGMUND FREUD, with whom the au
thor had some "differences."

BERTRAND RUSSELL, who receives
praise and devastating criticism.

GEORGE SANTAYANA, who was 86

(continued on back flap)

KANSAS CITY, MO Puou.C LIBRARY

920 S131g

Eastman, Max, 1883- 14*75

Great companions; critical
memoirs of some famous friends

920 E131g 59-05707

Eastman, Max, 1883- $4-75

Great companions j critical
memoirs of some famous friends
N.Y.j Farrar, Straus and Cudahy
[1959]

312p.

L)A
MAY' "195$""""""

GREAT
COMPANIONS

BOOKS BY MAX EASTMAN

Enjoyment of Poetry
Child of the Amazons and Other Poems

Journalism versus Art

Understanding Germany

Colors of Life, Poems

The Sense of Humor

Since Lenin Died

Leon Trotsky, The Portrait of a Youth
Marx and Lenin, The Science of Revolution

Venture, A Novel

Kinds of Love, Collected Poems

The Literary Mind, Its Place in an Age of Science

Artists in Uniform
Art and the Life of Action

Enjoyment of Laughter

Stalin's Russia and the Crisis in Socialism

Marxism: Is It Science?

Heroes I Have Known

Enjoyment of Living, An Autobiography

Lot's Wife, A Dramatic Poem

Poems of Five Decades

Reflections on the Failure of Socialism

The Road to Abundance (with Jacob Rosin)

TRANSLATIONS

Gabriel, by Alexander Pushkin

The Real Situation in Russia, by Leon Trotsky

The History of the Russian Revolution, by Leon Trotsky

The Revolution Betrayed, by Leon Trotsky

EDITED

Capital and Other Writings, by Karl Marx

Anthology for the Enjoyment of Poetry
Czar to Lenin, A Moving-Picture History of the Russian Revolution

Max Eastman
GREAT COMPANIONS

CRITICAL MEMOIRS

O F
SOME FAMOUS FRIENDS

Farrar, Straus and Cudahy

NEW YORK

Copyright 1942, 1959 by Max Eastman

Library of Congress catalog card number 59-6068

First Printing, 1959

The quotation from Edna St. Vincent Millay is taken

from Collected Poems, Harper & Brothers, copyright 1928

by Edna St. Vincent Millay; copyright renewed 1956 by

Norma Millay Ellis.

Published simultaneously in Canada by Ambassador Books, Ltd.,
Toronto. Manufactured in the U.S.A.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Two of the twelve memoirs in this book appeared in some
what different form in the Reader's Digest. Parts of three
others appeared in my book, Heroes I Have Known, pub
lished by Simon & Schuster in 1942. Other parts appeared
in the Freeman, The American Mercury, Etude, and the
National Review. The portrait of my mother is repub-
lished "by request" from my earlier book and from the
Reader's Digest.

Contents

Explanatory
3

OLD MAN SCRIPPS

7

THREE VISITS WITH EINSTEIN
21

THE GREAT AND SMALL IN
ERNEST HEMINGWAY

4*
MY FRIENDSHIP WITH EDNA MILLAY

77

SANTAYANA IN A CONVENT

THE MAGICS IN PABLO CASALS

PROBLEMS OF FRIENDSHIP WITH TROTSKY

DIFFERING WITH SIGMUND FREUD
J7J

TWO BERTRAND RUSSELLS

CHARLIE CHAPLIN: MEMORIES
AND REFLECTIONS

207

JOHN DEWEY: MY TEACHER AND FRIEND

MY FIRST GREAT COMPANION
299

E. W. Scripps

Eisenstaet

Albert Einstein

Eisenstaedt

Ernest Hemingway

Edna Millay

Berenice Abbott

FT

George Santayana

Pablo Casals

Leon Trotsky
and one of his daughters

European

Sigmund Freud

Alfred Eisenstaedt

Bertrand Russell

Charles Chaplin and the author
at Chaplin's studio in 1919

John Dewey

Sylvia Salmi

Rev. Annis Ford Eastman

GREAT
COMPANIONS

Explanatory

c.

(ompanion is a word with a warm current flowing
through it, usually in two directions. It means that two
people walk hand-in-hand a good long distance, or more
etymologically and less exhaustingly they "break bread
together/' I think I have broken bread, or at least a sym
bolic tea-biscuit or two, with all but one of the famous
people portrayed in this book. With some of them I have
been close friends. But that is not what I mean by Great
Companions. I found the phrase in Walt Whitman's Song
of the Open Road:

4 GREAT COMPANIONS

Allans! After the great companions, and belong to them!
They too are on the road they are the swift and majestic
men they are the greatest women. . . .

It does not necessarily imply a two-way relation, but is
just a way of describing contemporaries whom one has
known and greatly admired. I like to admire people. In
boyhood I was an intemperate hero-worshipper. You had
only to inform me that somebody was "great/' whether a
poet or a football player, and I would stick his portrait up
on the walls of my bedroom not I fear, for purposes of
emulation, but mere passive adulation. I can still see a
small white plaster bust of Mozart that stood on my bureau.
He was a "great composer," though I could not at that time
have distinguished his music from a tune on the hurdy-
gurdy. Nature designed me, it seemed, for an adept of the
Leader cult, but I got interested after a while in seeing
what I could do with my own humble self. I still cherish
my heroes, but I have learned to look upon them with a
critical eye, and draw their portraits without too much awe.

It is significant that by the time he reaches the end of
his stanza, Walt Whitman has included among his Great
Companions everybody who is vividly alive. That, to be
sure, is far from everybody. But the implication seems to
be that heroes are not so different from everyday people,
or what is potential in everyday people, and for one with
a "vice of admiration/' as my propensity has been called,
that I suppose is worth remembering. I could have written
a book like this about a number of my friends who never
achieved anything more than a life keenly lived, and who
will leave no name in history. But a certain mundane glory

Explanatory 5

would be lacking to which I am sensitive, and a forgetful-
ness of my own mundane ambitions. "To belong to them"
or better, take part in them is a fair description of the
effort I have made in these reminiscent portraits. It is not
quite such hard work as trying to amount to something in
your own person.

Old Man Scripps

A SUCCESS STORY WITHOUT A MORAL

E

I. W. Scripps was nearing sixty when I met him a
multimillionaire and the owner of a chain of thirty news
papers with a circulation running into millions. I was edit
ing the Masses, a revolutionary magazine selling 10,000
copies and losing $12,000 a year. It was Lincoln Steffens
who caused our coming together. Steff was a sort of cherish
ing godfather to all revolutionary enterprises, and he said
to me one day, returning from the west: "Old man Scripps
might give you some money for your magazine he reads it
every month." The money end of this seemed highly im
probable to me, but the news that I had such a reader was
exciting. I was curious to look into his eyes.

8 GREAT COMPANIONS

E. W. had bought, in middle age, a two-thousand-acre
ranch upland from the sea near La Jolla, California, built
a sixty-room ranch house, and retired there to think his
thoughts, boss his family, and let his newspaper empire
except for an occasional peremptory order over the long
distance telephone expand and blossom of its own sweet
will. Coming to the end of a lecture tour at San Diego, I
trekked out in an old Model-T Ford car to call on him. We
enjoyed each other so much that I stayed a week, and then
subsequently I spent other weeks in that hospitable ranch
house.

They were weeks devoted almost entirely to abstract
thought mingled, to be sure, with gusts of laughter and
clouds of tobacco smoke. We never gossiped; we never took
a walk; we never took a drink; we never went driving. He
put at my disposal a "real car" and allowed me to tear its
guts out teaching myself to operate a grown-up gearshift,
but aside from that our friendship consisted of sitting to
gether in his study smoking an endless chain of mild, made-
to-order Key West cigars, and talking about ideas from
three to six hours at a stretch.

He was tall, lanky, blotchy-faced, copper-headed, had a
cast in one eye and a deadly quiet look in the other a
natural for the role of pirate if properly made up. He used
to carry a gun in the old days in Cleveland when his penny
Press opened an era in American journalism by publishing
uncomfortable facts recklessly, cheaply, briefly, and from
the workingman's point of view. He told me that one day
in the antechamber of a courtroom, a mob incited by his
enemies backed him into a corner with arguments that

Old Man Scripps g

came close to physical violence. Suddenly somebody yelled,
"He's going to shoot!" which may or may not have been
true, but he was alone in about ten seconds.

"I looked in a mirror afterward," he told me, "and won
dered whether it was the gun or my looks that caused the
evacuation."

It was mainly, I surmise, his looks. He pulled that gun
more than once, but he never had to shoot. He was a mental
and moral athlete, but physically soft, with slim weak hands
like a woman's a frightening combination, especially
when a gun is in the hands.

He sits very clear in my imagination, slanting back from
his desk in a swivel chair, squinting quizzically through
the smoke, laying down the law as though he knew every
thing on all subjects, and yet as strongly intimating
whether with the intellectual mirth in his eyes, the depre
cating gestures, the occasional wistful question that, like
the rest of us, he probably knew little or nothing at all.
Every once in a while he would get up and walk over into
an alcove and come back with a manuscript. It would be
a "Disquisition" by himself on the subject we were discuss
ing. He would read it to me with an expression of delighted
surprise at the wisdom he found in it a surprise which I
fully shared. Scripps had a mind like Montaigne's fertile,
discursive, full of extremely rational doubts and specula
tions about everything under the sun. And though he
lacked the gift of great language, his Disquisitions had the
same qualities of personal candor, intellectual daring, and
ultimate unanswerable doubt that Montaigne's Essays have.
But instead of publishing them, he locked them up in an

1C GREAT COMPANIONS

old black steel box to lie there until his grandchildren were
grown up.*

Montaigne may seem far afield, but there is certainly no
American, least of all among those who attain wealth and
power, with whom to compare this rich-minded yet angular
character. He was as different from Hearst as his utilitarian
ranch-house was from the gaudy show of St. Simeon. He
was different from all the journalistic big shots in his in
tense intellectuality and reckless individualism qualities
that made some people call him a crank, though no crank
was ever so canny and astute.

He was an avowed atheist; he never went to church or
the theater or a political rally or a ball game. He felt that
"whatever is, is wrong." He had so low an opinion of man
kind, including himself, that he cared nothing for their
respect and little for their affection. Fame he regarded as
a bauble; he never made an effort even to retain his self-
respect. At least so he said, and to prove it he boasted that
for twenty-five years he "consumed enough whiskey to keep
three or four men drunk all the time," stopping only when
his health faltered. He was a restless traveler, an omnivo
rous reader, a lover of poetry much of which he found in
the Bible in spite of what he called "the imbecility of Sun
day Schools and so-called Sunday School teachers/' He
knew all the maxims in Poor Richard's Almanack and
didn't agree with any of them. He made it a point to sleep
all he could, and never got up until he felt like it. He never

* Selections from these Disquisitions were published in 1951 in a book
called Damned Old Crank, and I learned from the editor's introduction
that I was one of the two or three "respected cronies" to whom he ever
showed them.

Old Man Scripps 11

kept books, and regarded the usual set o books kept by
businessmen as "an unbearable nuisance/' And yet he was
one of the most successful businessmen in the history of
our country. Starting as a farm boy coming to Detroit with
eighty dollars sewn into the lining of his vest, he died at
sea in a palatial private yacht, leaving an estate of over fifty
million dollars.

Nothing like Scripps could have come to pass outside of
America, and yet nothing is more un-American more un
like the national success story than the way he piled up a
fortune without working. He founded his first paper, the
Cleveland Press, in 1 878 with an investment of only % 10,000
which he borrowed from his brother George. Sixteen
months later, he went to St. Louis to found the Evening
Chronicle. Subsequently he returned to Cleveland, stayed
six months, then left for Europe with his adored sister
Ellen. From then until his death in 1926 he was in complete
control of the Cleveland Press, yet during all those years
to quote his own words "I have not spent as much as
thirty days in Cleveland/* By the turn of the century the
Press was worth millions.

"I was always ready," he adds, "to do four men's work
in a day, when there was any occasion for it, but I was
always seeing to it that such occasions were very rare. I am
sure that from the time I was twenty-four, more than half
my days have been spent with no conscious thought or at
tention to business of any sort. The practice of journalism
seems to me, even now, to have been an unimportant inci
dent in my life/'

In the course of our conversations, Scripps mentioned
three reasons why he had succeeded so brilliantly without

12 GREAT COMPANIONS

much steady work. One was that he decided early exactly
what he was going to do. It seems to have been the size
and proportions of the Roman Coliseum that brought him
to this decision. He was wandering aimlessly around Eu
rope, twenty-four years old, dreaming of becoming a great
writer; but one afternoon, lying in the sun on a fallen
pillar in the Coliseum, he decided to be a great power in
stead. He would build an empire, a newspaper empire.
Others could do the writing. He would stay in the back
ground, unknown, unacclaimed, but with absolute control.

Another reason he gave for his success almost the same
one perhaps was that he knew exactly what the essence
of his genius was: practical judgment. By cultivating that
and letting others shoulder both the work and the worry,
he saved the energy at the beginning that few ambitious
men save until the end of their careers. A third cause of
his seemingly offhand success was his intuitive knowledge
of men. He made the astonishing statement that in his en
tire career he had probably not given over five hundred
orders to the men employed on his papers. All he did was
to choose the men, study them, inspire them with talks and
letters to do the best they had it in them to do.

A few surviving aphorisms will suggest the kind of in
spiration to be found in those talks and letters:

1. It is possible for a hypocrite, by exercising constant
restraint^ to appear as good as the most sincere moralist,
but it is awfully hard work.

2. Never do anything yourself that you can get someone
else to do for you. The more things someone else does for
you, the more time and energy you have for the things no
one else can do for you.

Old Man Scripps 13

3. Never hate anybody. Hatred is a useless expenditure
of mental and nervous energy.

4. Be diplomatic, but don't be too damned diplomatic.
It is rare indeed when circumstances are such that a con
scientious man can lose anything by fearless, frank, speech
and writing.

E. W. was especially fearless and frank about his illicit
love life. He had the bad-boy habit of dividing girls into
"nice" and "not nice," and until marriage, was both assid
uous and promiscuous in his devotion to the "not nice'*
girls. One of them who had been his mistress in Detroit
came to his office in Cincinnati where he was just getting a
good start with the Post and tried to blackmail him. He
summoned the city editor and directed him to call up the
two rival papers and tell them to send over reporters. When
the reporters arrived, he introduced his visitor.

"Miss Brown," he said, "used to live with me as my mis
tress. She was paid for what she did and we parted on good
terms. She has come here today threatening to revive that
story and asking for money. You are at liberty to print the
story. So far as I am concerned, the incident is closed."

The story was run with big headlines, and to the surprise
of everybody, it did no harm either to the circulation of
the paper or the standing of its editor. Cincinnati's ap
proval of fearless, frank speech evidently outweighed its
disapproval of illicit sex relations. When he married at the
age of thirty-one, Scripps foreswore such relations, success
fully, for the rest of his life.

As startling as the casual way Scripps built his empire >
is the promptitude with which he abdicated and began

14 GREAT COMPANIONS

gradually to get out of it. Only twelve years after that day
of dreams in the Coliseum, E. W. called in his business
manager, Milton McRae, one morning and offered him a
limited partnership with a one-third share in the salary
and profits. To this he attached one condition: that McRae
should run the Scripps-McRae papers on 85 percent of
their gross income. He also continued, from his ranch in
California, to watch over the empire like a hawk, receiving
daily and weekly reports from each paper, and traveling in
spurts that mounted up to ten thousand miles annually to
keep tabs on them. He would do this traveling in a private
car with two secretaries, working all the time. But when he
got home he would give his whole heart again to planting
eucalyptus forests and citrus groves, building reservoirs,
laying miles of pipe to reclaim his private wilderness, grow
ing up with his sons, and above all reading books that had
nothing whatever to do with journalism. He estimated that,
throughout life, he had spent a good half of his waking
hours with his eyes on the pages of a book.

One of his agreements with McRae had been that, if
moved to expand the business, each should have as his
special territory the region in which he happened to start
a paper first. Scripps had observed and he thought McRae
had too that there was a free field for a lively evening
paper in Dallas, Texas. He had also observed and studied
an obscure reporter named Alfred O. Anderson, who was
working for a small wage on the Scripps-McRae paper in
St. Louis. Out of the blue sky young Anderson received a
telegram, signed with the imperial letters, directing him to
go to Dallas and have an evening paper on the streets at the

Old Man Scripps 15

earliest possible moment. He would find money to his
credit in a Dallas bank. Anderson, after catching his breath,
knowing what orders signed E. W. meant, made up the first
edition of a four-page newspaper, had it printed in St.
Louis, took it with him on a train, and had it on sale in
Dallas the next afternoon. E. W. delighted to outwit peo
ple. Especially he delighted to outwit this semi-partner,
McRae, whose lack of humor he found as distressing as his
enormous energy and concentration admirable.

Scripps took a similar delight in outwitting the plans
of the Associated Press to form a monopoly of the news-
gathering business. They offered to take him in on the
scheme but he declined. They then set a zero hour; he
could either come in then or remain forever out in the
cold. He waited until the zero hour was past, making his
preparations meanwhile to establish a news agency of his
own. Then he sent an emissary to their meeting, arrogantly
demanding that his papers be admitted on an equality with
all others. When they responded, as he anticipated, with
derisive laughter, he sent out his already prepared tele
grams announcing the formation of the Scripps-McRae
Press Association subsequently renamed the United Press.
He regarded this blow against monopoly in the gathering
of news as his greatest service to American journalism.

To his serene recollection of the few orders he gave, his
employees would add that when he did give an order, it
was obeyed instantly or the explosion would rock the build
ing. At home he behaved like an oriental despot. His ranch-
house castle was all on one floor, and as you passed from
room to room, you would see tacked up beside each door
way in his handwriting:

l6 GREAT COMPANIONS

SHUT THE DOOR. E. W. SciippS.

After breakfast, just before rising from the table, he
would issue an order-of-the-day: "Bob, I want to confer
with you immediately, and I'll see you again at two P.M.
Nackie [his wife], I will drive with you at four. Max, we
will talk in my office at ten."

Our talks would last from ten o'clock to one usually, and
be subject to renewal afternoon or evening. Upon dismissal,
as I staggered from the room groggy with nicotine and
sheer exhaustion of the brain cells, he would say "thank
you for the conversation/' as though I had had some choice
in the matter.

I remember his reading me a frankly boastful Disquisi
tion in which he stated that he was one of the thousand
richest men in the United States and, with an apology for
the "conceit," asserted that he was "two percent responsible
for all that is good or ill in the management of this great
nation/' To prove this, he showed me a letter from Burle-
son, Woodrow Wilson's Postmaster General, acknowledg
ing that the Administration owed its victory in the 1916
elections to the Scripps papers. So this conceit was not un
founded. But no such trait was ever present in his conver
sation. He had, with all his imperiousness, a vein of honest
humility. I asked him once why he never tackled New York
with a Scripps paper. "I'm not a big enough man/' he said.
'"That takes a Hearst or a Pulitzer."

From my point of view he was too big a man too think
ing a man. He was too fond of reasoning and of thought
ful speculation. He cared more about the meditations he
locked up in that iron box than those he expressed in his
newspapers. His purest passion was for scientific truth. The

Old Man Scripps 17

press release bureau called Science Service that he estab
lished in Washington, and the Scripps Institute for Bio
logical Research and for Oceanography which he proudly
showed me through at La Jolla, are, according to my recol
lection of him, more eminently than the United Press or
the great Scripps-Howard chain of newspapers, the chil
dren of his mind and spirit. In that phase of his being his
motives were pure and clear.

As a man of the world, he had two motives which seemed
to me perilously mixed. One was a passionate determina
tion to get rich to rise into the big employing class se
curely and forever. It is more blessed to give than to re
ceive wages was a maxim of which he became convinced
in early youth, and his purpose to stay on the upper side
of this transaction was as hard as steel. But at the same time
he was instinctively hostile to men of wealth, and despised
militantly the journalism which consists of "rich men talk
ing to the other rich."

In 1900 his brother James, who was losing money on a
newspaper in Chicago, begged him to come in and take over
the management. They met to discuss it in a hotel room
that looked down on Dearborn Street. While they were
talking, a noise of shouts and scuffling came up from below.
It was a riotous incident in the teamster's strike then in
progress. As they looked down, James muttered: "I wish
I were mayor of this city; I'd teach those men a lesson."

E. W. said: "You want those teamsters clubbed, shot
down, or arrested. I want them to win. That shows we can't
work together. You'll have to go it alone."

Politically E. W.'s papers were independent, and they
have been credited with having "freed the American press

l8 GREAT COMPANIONS

from its slavery to party title and obligation." But they
were bound by a passionate loyalty to the workers and the
common people 95 percent of the population, according
to E. W.'s evaluations. "CP" and "95%" were inter-office
abbreviations employed on the Scripps papers to designate
this object of their loyalty. They championed every meas
ure designed to improve the status of labor: the eight-hour
day, closed shop, collective bargaining, workers' compensa
tion, employees' insurance, anti-injunction laws. They also
fought for the income tax, although Scripps regretted this
in later years as bad economics.

It was instinctive with him to champion every measure
directed against what he called the "wealthy and intellec
tual classes." He always linked those two adjectives in de
scribing the chief enemy; and both adjectives exactly fitted
him. A war like that against himself would defeat, if not
destroy, most men. In most times and places it would defeat
any man. But in American newspaperdom from 1878 to
1916 and in E. W. Scripps it produced an enormous
personal fortune and one of the most powerful weapons
ever wielded in behalf of the underdog.

There was a developing class struggle in America in those
years, and the Scripps papers, without getting tangled in
the doctrinal formulation of it, took the side of the rising
class of wage labor. E. W. stoutly and constantly cham
pioned the cause of the trade unions in his papers. But he
had the good sense to leave socialism alone, or dismiss it
with such remarks as: "Society owes nothing to any individ
ual only that human being who can support himself or
herself is entitled to a place in the world* '; or with more
ultimate wisdom: "Class warfare must be perpetual." He

Old Man Scripps 19

seems now to have seen through socialism more clearly than
any other critic I met in those days. He surprised me by
saying: "Your propaganda will probably in the long run
succeed," and then adding this perfect prophecy, "The
thing you'll get will be as different from what you are talk
ing about as modern organized Christianity is from the
visions of Jesus."

Scripps did, as Steffens predicted, give money to my mag
azine, although he refused to call it a gift. He called it an
experiment. "You come out here next year and show me
your financial report," he said, "and I'll know whether I
acted from sentimentalism or good sense."

The next year I had my business manager make a report
from which the inference was unescapable that Scripps
ought to double his contribution. I explained this to him
while he looked over the document.

"Max, you make a good speech," he said, "but I knew
that already. I heard you over in San Diego. The figures on
this paper, on the other hand, convince me that your mag
azine is a failure. It's a delight to me personally, but it isn't
good business. You'll have to find a philanthropist. I'm
a businessman."

I did find a philanthropist, and although the story be
longs in my biography rather than this portrait of him,
I will repeat it here, for it brought our friendship to an
appropriately humorous conclusion.

Like most people addicted to property, Scripps had a
strong sense of identity with his family. Thanks to his life
long guidance, his sister Ellen had become almost as rich as
he was. She lived down by the sea at La Jolla, and he asked
me before leaving that afternoon to stop in with him and

20 GREAT COMPANIONS

meet her. Ellen Scripps was thin and scrawny, and so old
that her skin was yellow and caked in large squares like a
crocodile's. I never saw another walking thing that looked
so old. Her mind, however, was not dimmed except by the
impulses of her heart, which were more pious than E. W.'s
and more benevolent. She believed in church and Sunday
School, and gave large subsidies to religious as well as edu
cational ventures. She believed still more in her brother,
however, and received me with great warmth because of
our friendship. I said good-bye to E. W. at her door and
drove away but I did not drive very far. I was lurking
behind a bush on her lawn when E. W. took his leave, and
a few moments later I rang her bell. I had come back
just on an impulse to ask her if she wouldn't help me
with my magazine. I showed her the figures that had been
so convincing when prepared for E. W., and they became
again miraculously logical and clear.

"How much does your magazine need?" she asked. "I've
pledged almost all I planned to give this year to a little
paper that our church is publishing."

"I only need six thousand dollars right now," I said.

"I'm really very sorry," she said, "I couldn't give you that
much right now. I wonder if it wouldn't be possible for you
to get along if I sent it in three annual installments?"

Many years later, when Jo Davidson made his bust of
E. W., the old man related with gusto how, when he re
fused to give The Masses four thousand dollars and told me
to find a philanthropist, I went down and lifted six from
his philanthropic sister. It added, I think, to his respect for
me.

Three Visits with Einstein

JLt was Dick Simon and Max Schuster, publishers of my
book Enjoyment of Laughter,, who engineered my first
meeting with Albert Einstein. He had written, in collabo
ration with a young Polish mathematician named Leopold
Infeld, a popular account of his contributions to physics,
and Simon and Schuster were preparing to make a best
seller of it. A conference of the four of them, two authors
and two publishers, was slated for April 20, 1937 at Ein
stein's home in Princeton, New Jersey. Dick Simon, whose
candor is as winning as his sense of humor and closely
allied to it, said to me: "Max, we have an appointment
with Einstein, and as the publishers of his book we feel we

22 GREAT COMPANIONS

ought to take along someone who can at least put up a
show of understanding what it's about."

In that mood and with that confidential mission, I went
to a meeting I had aspired to for a long time. My way of
accomplishing the mission was to steer the conversation as
far away from the book as I could without abandoning the
general subject of science. I had taught a course in the
Principles of Science at Columbia University many years
before, and felt I could still put up a show of knowing
something about that. The result was two hours of conver
sation with Einstein which I treasure among my happiest
memories, and which interested him enough at least to give
rise to two more conversations, not engineered by Simon
and Schuster.

Einstein's wife had died only a month or two before our
visit, and we were apprehensive that we might find him dis
traught or depressed. But Infeld assured us that the loss
had made little difference either in his mood or the tenor
of his life.

"He lives so entirely in his thoughts, literally working
with his mind all day long, that he is almost insensible to
pain/' is what Infeld said.

We found him in a conventionally ugly frame house, a
form of ugliness prevalent enough in America to suggest
that everybody lives in his thoughts or at least not in his
eyes. But he received us upstairs in a back room with an
enormous plate-glass window looking out so immediately
into the trees that the ugly house did not seem to matter.
Maybe after all he doesn't live entirely in his thoughts, I
reflected. When I asked him, however, whether he had
found that window in the house or had it put in, he said:

Three Visits with Einstein 23

"No, my wife did that. I didn't like it at first. I thought
when I was in a house I ought to be inside/'

"It seems logical/' I said, though it did not seem any
more than that.

Everything about him, the outflying hair, neither mane-
like nor properly combed, the absence of a necktie, the
rather baglike costume, the ill-cared-for teeth, the furniture
too much sat in, suggested a man indifferent to the sense-
qualities of the world whose laws of motion he studied
with such rapture.

As I have remarked elsewhere, I usually receive from
great men in any walk of life, and always with surprise, an
impression of femininity. In Einstein this was striking, his
gestures being fastidious rather than compelling, and his
swaying gait suggesting to my mind a buxom mammy. His
hands were fat, veinless, and unwrinkled like those of a
baby. It was a strange body in which to locate a mind with
an edge so keen and hard it could penetrate all the natural
assumptions of life and conversation, and even of what had
been physical and chemical science, to an armature of
mathematical abstractions which contain hardly a recollec
tion of the concrete perceptions that make them valid.

After a little desultory talk about the date and format
of the book, Dick Simon, who is a photographer of genius,
asked Einstein whether he would mind posing for a picture
or two.

"Oh no/' he said, "that is my profession now."

And he related how on a train he had once put off an
inquisitive fellow-passenger who asked him what he did for
a living by saying, "I'm a photographer's model."

To make the picture, it being a warm spring day, we

24 GREAT COMPANIONS

went down to a little plot of lawn and garden behind the
house. It was there, sitting in two arm chairs, while the sun
sifted down through the baby leaves, and Dick circled
around taking pictures from carefully chosen points-of-
view, that our conversation about the universe began. One
or two of the pictures, Dick assured me on the way home,
were so fine that I would certainly go down to posterity as
having got next, at least, to a great man. But when he
reached home he telephoned to break the sad news that I
was still mortal he had forgotten to put a film in his
camera. So I had to content myself with writing down very
carefully the substance of the conversation he had intended
to immortalize.

Einstein had been quoted to me as saying that while he
did not believe in an anthropomorphic God, he consid
ered himself a religious man, and regarded the scientist's
striving toward rational knowledge of the universe as "re
ligion in the highest sense." I told him that I did not think
he was really religious, and I thought it was a mistake for
him to use the term.

"For the sake of clear thinking/' I said, "the word re
ligion ought to be used only to mean a faith that something
in the external world is sympathetic to man's interests."

"That is true of religion in its origin and early develop
ment," he said. "It is true of the primitive religion of fear,
and the social or moral religion which grew out of it."

In both of these phases, religion does, he conceded, as
sume that a force, or forces, in the external world are
sympathetic to man's interests. But there is a higher reli
gion which is free from fear and has nothing to do with

Three Visits with Einstein 25

morality. This higher religion he describes as "an attitude
of humility toward universal being."

My recollection here is far from verbatim, but the word
humility I distinctly remember. It was the insignificance
of human aims and wishes by comparison with the gran
deur of a rationally ordered universe that he emphasized.
He seemed to believe it was this religious feeling that sus
tained such men as Newton and Kepler and by inference,
of course, himself in their arduous efforts to understand
the universe.

I had my doubts about that. A scientist of the factual
kind who devotes himself to becoming a world authority
on molluscs, say, or caterpillars, often displays without any
deification of the subject matter, a similar devotion to his
task and to the truth. I said something like this, and maybe
had the hardihood to suggest that there was something like
professional pride in attributing a more arduous devotion,
or a more honorific motive, to those who study the universe
as a whole. At any rate, that was the drift of our difference,
and in response to his association of religion with humility,
I said that a certain humility toward natural fact seemed
to me characteristic of science at its best, and "it only con
fuses people's minds and makes them introduce super
natural ideas into science to call this attitude religious."

Einstein did not dissent very strongly from this; he did
not want to introduce supernatural ideas into science; but
I do not remember what he said. Our conversation was
broken off because the sun was withdrawing its rays from
the garden, Dick had taken the last of his imaginary pic
tures, and Einstein proposed that we go in to the porch,

26 GREAT COMPANIONS

which was hospitably close to the kitchen, and continue
the discussion over a cup of tea. By the time we were all
seated around a small table waiting for that tea, our con
versation had shifted, as conversations frequently do, from
the subject of religion to that of causal determinism.
Neither Dick nor Max Schuster took any part in it for
the reason, Dick told me afterward, although I question
his seriousness, that they could not follow it. Infeld also,
though for a different reason which he afterward explained,
kept mum.

I have more than the usual diffidence, but the naive gen
erosity with which Einstein gave the gift of attention to
anything that anybody said, looking up out of his merry
eyes with a childlike expectancy, broke the barrier com
pletely. I told him with the boldness of my youthful days
as an "assistant in philosophy" that I thought he talked
about tKe universality of causal determinism with too
much assurance. The principle can not be profitably aban
doned in performing a scientific experiment, I said, but if
generalized it destroys the validity of all scientific judg
ments. "If a mind is determined in its judgment by ante
cedent causes, then it cannot be determined by the reasons
upon which its judgment is supposed to be based."

Einstein had evidently never thought of that. Indeed I
never met anybody who had, although it has always seemed
to me the most obvious argument against universal deter
minism. He grappled with the idea delightedly, however,
as though it were some new kind of game we were playing.
After some random parries and thrusts, he said:

"We view the situation in one aspect when we say that a

Three Visits with Einstein 27

whole process is caused, and in another when we say that
a mind is judging on the basis of the evidence."

"But that is merely a dodge," I said. "If you are going
to be philosophic, you can't leave the ultimate truth with
two aspects."

He assented to that, but countered it with the difficulties
involved in the notion of free will. I admitted that this
notion seems of no more ultimate use or validity in de
scribing the situation than that of universal cause. A skep
ticism about the power of the human mind to solve any
ultimate problem honestly confronted is all the philosophy
I have, and like other negative positions it is not hard to
defend.

The argument was long and meandering, and I naturally
remember best my own contributions to it. I do remember
his surprise when I assured him that it was not moral free
dom I was primarily concerned about, but a confidence
that judgments and arguments in a discussion like ours are
real, and that the conclusions we reach (if any) are valid.

We did not, of course, reach any conclusion who ever
did in the game of free will versus determinism? but the
argument ended in his explaining my position to Infeld in
German with great clarity and force. What he said exactly
was:

"He means that if a judgment is merely a fact, then it
can not also be a truth."

"It sounds so good when you put it in German," I said,
"that now I am perfectly sure I am right."

To which he replied with a beaming smile, and pro
ceeded to carry the conversation back to that original ques-

28 GREAT COMPANIONS

tion about religion and science. There again I can only
remember how glib I was, and I hope this will be put down
to his entrancing attitude of inquiry rather than to an
egotistical absorption in my own opinions. It happened
that I had just published in Harper's magazine an essay on
Marxism, and to illustrate what I meant by defining reli
gion as involving a belief that the external world, or some
thing in it, is sympathetic to man's interests, I cited the
Marxian philosophy of dialectic materialism.

'Though it pretends to be scientific," I said, "the Marx
ian system is really a religion. Marx declared that the
world is made of matter, but proceeded to discover, mys
teriously enough, that this world of matter was achieving
with dialectic necessity exactly what he wanted to achieve.
The whole thing was just a gigantic effort to prove that
the external world is in favor of the proletarian revolu
tion and is helping it."

Carried away by my success with that, I went on to assert
that John Dewey's philosophy of pragmatism is a similar
effort: "Dewey gets the objective facts into harmony with
man's will by putting his will into the very process of de
termining the facts/'

Einstein did not answer this peroration. He only looked
around the table with a mischievous laugh.

"This man is wicked!" he said. "He is really wicked!"

At the door, when we shook hands, he said: "Hasn't it
been a delightful discussion!" And I must confess that I
feel ashamed when I see how little of his part in it I put
down in my notes or can now recall.

Three Visits with Einstein 29

II

Our second meeting came about through the mediation of
Infeld, who wrote me on April 22 :

Both Einstein and I were glad of the opportunity of
meeting you and thoroughly enjoyed your visit. . . .

If you would care to continue your argument with Ein
stein I could easily arrange another meeting. I should also
be glad of the opportunity to take your advice in several
matters concerning the book we are writing.

Let me hear from you.

Of course I was delighted, and I talked with Einstein
again in early May. This time I went down to Princeton
alone, and to diversify the adventure I stopped off on my
way to see the 5000 cows at the Walker-Gordon Dairy
Farm. Infeld met me at the station and we found Einstein
seated at his dining room table poring serenely over a pad
full of equations. It occurred to me that he probably pro
duced thoughts as contentedly and with as little interrup
tion as the Walker-Gordon cows produce milk. As between
the two, I thought Einstein had the better of it, but I
could not pretend that either represented my ideal of a
jovial life. Those cows stand in their stanchions, eating,
sleeping or chewing their cuds, all day and all night, all
the year around, and their only diversion is to walk twice a
day down a long underground chute, coming out in an
other building onto a turntable, which carries twenty of
them round and around for exactly ten minutes. During

gO GREAT COMPANIONS

this time each receives a bath and is milked by an electrical
milker. They then march out through another chute and
back to their stanchions. It refutes all my theories about
life's adventure to say it, but I have to confess that they
were among the happiest cows I ever gazed on.

The comparison seems a little foolish, perhaps, and dis
respectful, but the two visits occurred within the same
hour and I can't help it. Einstein too seemed permanently
contented and happy. "He lives entirely in his thoughts";
"he is almost insensible to pain": Inf eld's phrases came
back into my mind, and I wondered whether, after all, that
isn't the safest and securest place to live.

Einstein had evidently wanted to see me again, because
my remarks about causation had stimulated him to some
intense thinking on the subject. He wanted to tell me his
new thoughts. At least he was impatient of our talk until
we got on that subject again, and he brought forward his
new position with the eagerness of a child showing you
something he has made out of a broken toy. It began, al
most in the language of Kant, with the statement that the
law of causation does not apply to the observed order of
phenomena, or can not be proven to. It belongs rather to
the conceptual system with which the order of phenomena
is explained. Some phenomena, however and this was un-
Kantian enough can be better explained with a concep
tual system which does not universalize the principle of
cause, but assumes on the contrary that certain kinds of
events are uncaused.

I had heard rumors of this idea, or the dispute about it
among physicists, and I asked him whether it was pure

Three Visits with Einstein 31

speculation or a concept that can actually be made use oL
He assured me that it is actually used.

"In certain situations," he said, "we find that the aggre
gate of a vast number o individual events can be calcu
lated according to the laws of probability on the assump
tion that each individual event is a matter of pure chance.
Our laws concern the aggregates and they prove valid."

These statements, which I think I have quoted almost
verbatim, are of interest because they were a complete re
versal of the position Einstein had stubbornly held ever
since the dispute arose. Just why I should have been chosen
to receive the first news of this revolution, I can not im
agine. But it is a fact that when we emerged from the
house, I found Infeld in a state almost of rapture about
what Einstein had said.

"Do you realize how far he has moved!" he exclaimed.

Of course I realized nothing at all, and he explained to
me in joyous tones that these pronouncements marked a
total change of mind on Einstein's part, a surrender to
what he called the "younger" men. When we joined Mrs.
Infeld, who had come for us in a car, he communicated the
great news to her as though Princeton had just won a foot
ball game, or Poland a war, and rather as though he had
played the major role in gaining the victory.

"I've been working on him for over a year now/' he
said, "and here at last is the result."

When I made no answer he added:

"Didn't you notice the other day when you were talking
about causation I kept still, I never spoke a word?"

I said there was something in him which impelled me

g2 GREAT COMPANIONS

to say: "Yes, I did notice that, but I don't see quite how
it proves that you were the one who awoke him from his
dogmatic slumber."

He did not smile or seem to notice the drift of this asser
tion of my own egotism, but his wife smiled as though
she did.

Ill

On June 6, 1 received another letter from Infeld: "Could
you come out to Princeton either Thursday or Friday or
Saturday of next week. Einstein is still here. I need hardly
repeat how glad I shall be to see you again."

I came of course, and this time Max Schuster came with
me, though not, alas, Dick Simon with his camera that
hope of immortality was lost forever. I took along, how
ever, a copy of Harper's containing my essay on Marxism,
cheering myself with the thought that I would have at
least one very distinguished reader. We met in Infeld's.
apartment on the ground floor of 28 Vandeverter Avenue.
It was again a sunny day, and Einstein came strolling up
the street in a few moments, hatless and dressed like a stu
dent in an open shirt, an old brown-leather windbreaker^
and tennis shoes with no socks.

"What is this, a soviet of best-sellers?" he exclaimed as
he came in. He was in a charmingly discursive mood, and
I had the modesty this time to let him do the talking, con
tent to admire the sparkle in his eyes, the vigor, the vivid
ness and delightful variety of his thoughts.

I remember Max Schuster's inquiring about the possibil-

Three Visits with Einstein 33

ity of a book about chemistry such as they had written
about physics, and Inf eld's saying: "Chemistry is so dull
that I don't see how you could find anybody to write about
it." Einstein agreed that chemistry is dull a strange opin
ion, it seemed to me, since I thought the exploration of the
atom had well-nigh obliterated the distinction between
chemistry and physics.

We spoke again of the people who employ the prestige
of science in order to propagate religious beliefs. I men
tioned the books of Jeans and Eddington, and Einstein
said far more boldly than I would dare to:

"Those are bad books. They are not honest books. And
yet those men are such great astronomers and famous
writers it is hard to find anybody who can oppose them
with the simple truth."

We talked about politics, and I was led to believe that
Einstein possessed a remarkably hard and keen political in
telligence. He predicted that if Hitler was victorious in his
ambition to dominate Europe, America would be drawn
into war "not by an attack, but by the mounting author
ity of fascism." He predicted an alliance between Stalin
and Hitler. Of the "confessions" of the old Bolsheviks in
the Moscow trials, then in progress, he said:

"Of course they are not true. It is impossible that twenty
men being caught in a conspiracy, would all react in the
same way and that in so unnatural a way as to defile
themselves publicly."

To my remark that if the French premier, Leon Blum,
had sent the requested munitions to the Spanish republic,
there would have been no civil war in Spain, he answered:
"That is true, but you have to remember that Blum had a

34 GREAT COMPANIONS

difficult situation in his own country. More than half the
French army were fascists. He wasn't wise enough to do it,
but he was also not strong enough to do it if he had been
wise. You might say that if Blum had been a greater man
he both would and could have done it."

"Time works against the democracies," is a remark I
recorded. And this: "They should have stopped fascism
when, or before, it began. And they should stop it now."
He meant stop it by force of arms, and as he had burst
upon my political horizon ten years before as an ultra-
pacifist and anti-militarist, this revealed a concreteness
and flexibility of judgment that delighted me.

Such opinions, advanced in 1937, gave no hint of Ein
stein's post-war career among the most willing of the lib
eral tools of the Communist conspiracy. In those later
years, he gave his name unhesitatingly to communist fronts,
twenty-six of them; he wrote for the Communist magazine,
Soviet Russia Today; he went to the defense of the "Holly
wood Ten" who were jailed for contempt of Congress
(most if not all of them identified as Communist Party
members). He wrote a letter urging all intellectuals to defy
the effort of the government, through congressional inves
tigations, to frustrate an avowed conspiracy to overthrow
it as though any government could ultimately survive
which tolerated such a conspiracy. He avowed his belief
that the ills of the world can only be eliminated by "the
establishment of a socialist economy/' and published this
avowal in Masses and Mainstream, a magazine published
by pro-Communists and dedicated to the defense of the
Soviet dictatorship. He put himself in a position to be

Three Visits with Einstein 55

hailed by the Communist Daily Worker as "the living sym
bol of the United Front,'* the United Front being one of
the most dastardly tricks of blandishment and betrayal ever
practiced upon mankind.

It is beyond my scope to explain what happened to Ein
stein to soften him in this way during the decade of the
Second World War. In 1937 he was ready to stop the tyrant
Hitler by force of arms; in 1947 he was a cushion brought
forward to deaden every blow against Stalin's more per
fected and more menacing tyranny.

The explanation which fits best with my admiration is
that Hitler's specialized and bestial persecution of the Jews,
with whom as a people Einstein fervently identified him
self, unsettled his judgment of the problem in general
human terms. For it seemed, although the inference was
erroneous, that in overwhelming the Nazis, Soviet Russia
had been a liberator of the Jews. Whatever the explana
tion, this streak of blind emotionalism in a ruthlessly ra
tional mind may serve as a warning to me, and to all
those inclined to hero-worship, not to let our admiration
carry us too far. "Let every man be respected as an indi
vidual and no man idolized," is a quotation from Einstein
himself that may well be remembered in appraising him.

Another subject we spoke of in that third conversation
was Sigmund Freud, whom Einstein described as "a very
great man." "I think he has invented some wonderful
ideas, but whether they are true or not, we in our lifetime
will probably never know. The trouble is that in psychi
atry verification is impossible. The fault, I think, is in the
subject rather than in Freud."

36 GREAT COMPANIONS

I remarked that I thought Freud lacked the spirit of
verification, not only the possibility o it. And Max
Schuster interposed, very astutely I thought:

"What Freud lacks is the spirit that led Mr. Einstein to
make that remark about him."

"I had a dream once," Einstein said, "that seemed in a
small way to verify one of Freud's theories. At Berlin we
had a professor named Rude whom I hated and he hated
me. I heard one morning that he had died, and meeting a
group of my colleagues I told them the news this way:
'They say every man does one good deed in his lifetime,
and Rude is no exception he has died!'

"That night I dreamt that I was sitting in the lecture
hall and Professor Rude came in looking very healthy and
self-important. I hurried up to him, shook his hand cor
dially and said: 'I am so glad you are alive!'

"I suppose Freud would say I was inwardly ashamed of
my bitter remark about Rude, and the dream relieved me
of that feeling of remorse."

Whatever Freud might say, the incident did, I thought,
cast a charming light on Einstein's character.

As he stood up to go, I gave him the copy of Harper's
with my essay and said I very much wanted him to read it.
He clasped the magazine eagerly.

"I will read it. I want to read it very much," he said.

Infeld took it from his hand, and asked:

"Will you take it with you now, or shall I read it first
and bring it to you?"

"No, 111 take it with me," Einstein said, and made him
give it back.

He had decided to walk home "behind the town," as he

Three Visits with Einstein 37

expressed it, "to avoid embarrassments," and after settling
some technical questions with Max Schuster about the
book, he bade us good-bye. Max and I went to the window
to watch him ambling down the street in the old wind-
breaker and rather baggy pants a simple and gentle and
audacious man. When we turned back, Infeld had picked
up the copy of Harper's from the table on which Einstein
had left it, and was preparing a little speech.

"Now that is perfectly typical!" it began. "He decided
to take it instead of leaving it with me; and then after
making the decision he left it just the same. He didn't
really want to read it. But I will see that he does. Have no
fear. I will read it, and I will make him read it. . . ."

At that point in his speech the door opened a crack be
hind him, a cherubic face appeared in the opening, a hand
reached out and snatched the magazine from his grasp, and
the door closed again.

No word was spoken, but how we all laughed! And In
feld, after recovering his poise, turned a red face to me:

"Well, that's a tribute to you!" he said. "You don't
know what a tribute that is!"

In an obituary essay on Albert Einstein, Bertrand Rus
sell ignored the change I have described in his attitude
toward the statistical view of our knowledge of physical
reality.

"Einstein never accepted this view," Russell says. "He
continued to believe that there are laws, though as yet they
have not been ascertained, which determine the behavior
of individual atoms."

Little as I know about the subject, it was easy for me to

38 GREAT COMPANIONS

find in Einstein's Out of My Later Years evidence of the
change which Russell denies, but which gave Infeld so
much joy.

In March 1936, writing on "Quantum Theory and the
Fundamentals of Physics/' he said: "Probably never before
has a theory been evolved which has given a key to the in
terpretation and calculation of such a heterogeneous group
of phenomena of experience as has the quantum theory. In
spite of this, however, I believe that the theory is apt to
beguile us into error in our search for a uniform basis for
physics, because, in my belief, it is an incomplete repre
sentation of real things. . . . The incompleteness of the
representation is the outcome of the statistical nature (in
completeness) of the laws." (Journal of the Franklin Insti
tute,, Vol. 22 1, No. 3.)

Four years later, writing about "Physics and Reality,"
he said: "It is probably quite out of the question that any
future knowledge can compel physics again to relinquish
our present statistical theory in favor of a deterministic
one. . . ." (Science, Washington, B.C. May 24, 1940.)

He seems to have wavered, however, for in a concluding
paragraph he said:

"Some physicists, among them myself, cannot believe
that we must . . . accept the view that events in nature
are like a game of chance. It is open to every man to choose
the direction of his striving; and also every man may draw
comfort from Lessing's fine saying that the search for truth
is more precious than its possession."

I suspect it was the emotion which he described to me
as religious, rather than a concern for the fundamentals of
physics, that made Einstein so reluctant to abandon the

Three Visits with Einstein 39

deterministic view. In the foreword to his Mein Weitbild,
published in Amsterdam in 1933, he sang almost a psalm
o praise to the idea of universal causal determinism.
1 'Schopenhauer's statement that a man can do what he
wants to but he cannot will what he shall want to do, has
been an inspiration to me," he exclaimed, "from my youth
up."

This kind of "inspiration* ' is so alien to my nature that
I hesitate to make inferences from it. But it does seem ob
vious that anyone who in youth found it inspiring to live
in a world thus fixed and deprived of hazard would stub
bornly resist being routed out of it in old age.

The Great and Small in
Ernest Hemingway

E.

Ernest Hemingway will be surprised, I think, to find
himself among the people I call great. Our acquaintance,
though friendly and of long duration, was casual. But I was
very fond of him, and moreover he gave me one of the great
surprises of my life two of them in fact: one when he
turned out to be a magnificent writer, another when he hit
me in the face with a book.

We met in the spring of 1922 at the Hotel de Genes in
Genoa. We were both attending that first face-to-face meet
ing of the authentic heads of the great powers which has
gone down in history as the Genoa Conference. It was an
attempt to get Europe to settle down after the First World
War, the First Foolish Peace, and the First Communist

42 GREAT COMPANIONS

Revolution. The defeated Germans were there, and the
triumphant Bolsheviks, and every writer or newspaperman
who could manage to horn in. Ernest was sent down by the
Toronto Star as a special feature writer, an unusual distinc
tion for a young man of twenty-three. I was there with an
accreditation card from the New York World, and I did
send them one story.

My story was a description of the opening session of the
conference. I told how after all the delegations were seated,
Lloyd George having made his grandstand entrance and
the chairman having leafed over his notes and got ready
with his gavel, the four chairs reserved for the Russians
remained unoccupied. "Two minutes three five ten.
The tension began to grow into restlessness, impatience,
vexation. The Russians were late. Russians are always late.
Well, they ought not to be late when all the great men of
the earth have assembled for the express purpose of letting
them appear."

Ernest, who sat near me, summed it up more succinctly
with a remark about those chairs. "They are the four emp
tiest looking chairs I have ever seen."

He summed me up in the same article with a phrase
which I find considerably less brilliant: "like a big, jolly,
middle-western college professor."

One of those lazy-hearted spring days, George Slocombe
and Ernest and I motored over to Rapallo together. George
was the picturesque correspondent of the London Daily
Herald. His picturesqueness focused in a bright red dagger-
shaped beard and a vast black felt hat of the kind that
professional agitators, especially Italian anarchist agitators,
were accustomed to wear. His eyes after you found them
under that hat, were a mild and gentle blue, his nose small

The Great and Small in Ernest Hemingway 43

and shapely, his opinions fairly regular, and you said to
yourself, "Well, after all, the red beard and big black hat
was all there was to it!" But you liked him; he was and is,
a "swell guy/' Ernest was a swell guy more simply and ob
viously. Although already looking beyond journalism to a
career in literature, he did not begin by putting on the
Bohemian manner and trappings. He was gentle and unas
suming, dressed in easy-fitting but conventional suits of
clothes, and distinguished mainly by a winning laugh, a
handsome face and the most beautiful row of teeth I ever
saw in man, woman, or child.

Rapallo was only a few minutes beyond Santa Marghe-
rita where the Bolsheviks were lodged and where I hung
around a good deal of the time. I felt as if the little red-and-
white painted Ford car we rode in was a time machine car
rying us from the threshold of the revolutionary future
back into the previous century. For once in Rapallo we
had only to ring a bell at a little gate, climb up an in
going stairway, and there was the inimitable person of Max
Beerbohm, exquisitely clad and graciously at leisure, sip
ping a little Marsala wine on the open terrace of his villa,
looking out over the blue water, and feeling quietly happy
because he had just finished a series of deft and devastating
caricatures of the life of King Edward the Seventh!

He was cordial, most warmly cordial, considering the
abruptness of our arrival from so far off in the future and
with no introduction and no excuse but a desire to talk
with him.

"Not about politics!" was his only demur, and to that
we agreed so heartily that before long we were talking
politics with candor and abandon.

a displacement of the light rays when Britishers

44 GREAT COMPANIONS

come in contact with warmer-mannered people, which
makes it hard for them even to catch sight of each other for
a while. This difficulty was increased by the casualness of
our get-up and the exquisite neatness of the British gentle
man in Max Beerbohm, the faultless fit of his gray suit, the
neatly creased gray fet hat, and the trim mustache also a
perfect fit. The air did not clear completely until we got to
talking about the revolt of creative artists against commer
cial journalism. I was pretty glib about this, for as editor of
the Masses and its successor, the Liberator, I had to play
up this aspect somewhat at the expense of proletarian rev
olution in raising money from American millionaires. It
was also the subject of a little book of mine that Knopf
had published, Journalism Versus Art.

"We made the same revolt in England in The Yellow
Book" Beerbohm said. And he described how, under the
guidance of his friend Aubrey Beardsley, he had made his
debut as an artist in that most famous of "little magazines."
In him the mood of revolt had persisted, and in latter days
he never offered his drawings for publication at all. If they
appeared, it was by accident.

"For me they have achieved their destiny when they
exist," he said.

I imagine this conversation, culminating in that extreme
remark from a man we all admired, had a strong impact
on Hemingway's emotions. Although I did not know it
then, one of the major problems of his life was how to es
cape from his money-earning activity as a journalist how,
although married, to fix things financially so that he could
devote his time and his pen to literary art. The solution
was delayed for another year by the arrival of a baby, but

The Great and Small in Ernest Hemingway 45

he must have been filled already with the hope and the
miseries of it. He was so quiet, however, and so youthfully
attentive to our conversation, that I actually thought he
was a stranger to such topics.*

After we drove away I stopped the car a moment to jot
down a few of Max Beerbohm's remarks. Ernest laughed at
me and tapped his forehead.

"I have every word of it in here," he said. I believe this
was true, and is one of the main sources of his genius for
dialogue.

Ernest was a modest and princely-mannered boy in those
days, and his attitude to me, I thought exceptionally
friendly. He must have liked the Liberator, for he asked
me to read a sheaf of narrative and descriptive sketches he
was experimenting with. Although I was not deeply im
pressed I sent them along to my editorial successors, Claude
McKay and Michael Gold, for possible publication. Per
haps we were all unperceiving of Ernest's intense and noble
effort to "put down what really happened in action; what
the actual things were which produced the emotion you
experienced." f Perhaps, on the other hand, these first ef
forts were not too successful. Whatever the reasons, they
never appeared in the Liberator, and Ernest Hemingway
is one of the few distinguished writers of his generation

* Charles A. Fenton, in The Apprenticeship of Ernest Hemingway, de
scribes the vicissitudes of his transition from journalism to literary art. But
Fenton's judgments seem to rest wholly on the post hoc ergo propter hoc
fallacy. Since after five years of journalism Hemingway achieved a mag
nificent literary style, the five years of journalism seem to Mr. Fenton to
have been proven a good preparation. I think on the contrary, they left
him with certain bad habits and he did not overcome them all.
) The quotation is from Death in the Afternoon.

46 GREATCOMPANIONS

that I have to leave out when I list its contributors. I
learned afterward that his wife Hadley lost a whole
brief case full of those early writings and Ernest had to be
gin all over again a lucky loss, I am inclined to think,
having seen a sample of them.

At any rate, Ernest was not a genius to me then, but only
an alert and vivid-minded journalist whom I liked for his
frank way of telling me that he had been scared to death
in the war. We lived in the same hotel, and one morning a
hot water heater in his bathroom exploded and blew him
halfway down the hall. He picked himself up with a firm
and smiling composure that impressed everybody, and
made me treasure all the more affectionately the fact that
he had been scared in the war.

It was in Antibes and Paris, between 1924 and 1926, that
our friendship was renewed. I had finished my pilgrimage
to Moscow and returned to the west with Eliena Krylenko,
the laughter-loving sister of Nikolai, the Bolshevik orator
and Minister of Justice. American literary men were flock
ing to Europe like crows to a cornfield during those years
of the debased currencies, and most of them would alight
for a few months in the vicinity of the Cap d' Antibes. An
tibes, itself, as the base of the Cap, has for its climax a ro
mantic rampart, high and tawny-colored, with anciently
impregnable walls rising out of the water, and towers look
ing beyond Nice to the snowy tops of the Alpes Maritimes.
I found Ernest a nest for his typewriter up in a cranny of
the rampart, where I too for a time had a hide-out. He was
staying three miles away toward the end of the Cap and
rode back and forth on a bicycle. We swam together once
or twice at Eden-Roc, but it was in Paris the following win-

The Great and Small in Ernest Hemingway 47

ter that we became what I venture to call good friends.
Eliena and I had a room on the rue Vaugirard not very far
from where he and his wife, Hadley, were living. Hadley
was a likable though not alluring girl, rather on the square
side, vigorously muscular and independent; I think of her
as a natural born "hiker." We were all warm friends, warm
enough so that Ernest gave me a copy of Torrents of
Springs inscribed "To Max and Eliena with love/' Some
accident or instinct diverted me from reading it just then,
but I read "Up in Michigan" and other stories in the origi
nal edition of In Our Time, with startled admiration. I
could hardly believe that these harsh stories, so rank with
the savor of brute fact, so concise, so complete, were written
by the diffident young journalist who had shown me some
disconnected paragraphs in Genoa, three years before.

I was, I must explain, totally ignorant of the ambiance
and prehistory of this startling apparition. I am almost al
ways out-of-date and out-of-touch with what at any given
moment the literary circles are getting excited about. Sher
wood Anderson, it seems, was in and out of the bunch that
Hemingway foregathered with on the Left Bank during
this period. I had published some of Sherwood's first and
best stories in the old Masses and the Liberator, and ad
mired them vastly, but I was unaware that he was, or would
ever be, a talked-of innovator in styles of writing. Of his
presence in Paris or his literary friendship with Heming
way, I had never heard. Of Gertrude Stein and her cult, her
Three Lives, her influence on American writers in Paris, I
also knew nothing. I had seen years before in New York her
silly book, Tender Buttons equivalent in every respect
except sincere passion to the ravings of a lunatic and had

48 GREATCOMPANIONS

dismissed her and all her doings with a tolerant laugh. I
knew Leo Stein and lunched with him occasionally in Paris
because he had a learned brain, a prodigious vocabulary,
and an interest in the philosophic errors of John Dewey
and William James. He was, however, something of a bore,
and the fact that he had a foolish sister seemed to me illus
trative but incidental.

Owing to this constitutional incapacity to be au courant
with literary modes and talk-items, I was struck all of a
heap by the sharp, short, unelaborated, almost illiterate
realism of Hemingway's In Our Time. Eliena was working
in the Russian Embassy then, and we were both innocent
enough of what was going on in Moscow to think she might
translate the book into Russian, and I wrote a foreword ex
plaining this new prodigy to the Soviet intelligentsia. I
asked her once, in Ernest's presence, what would be the
Russian equivalent of "straight talk," and when Ernest
asked me why, explained that I was wondering how to
characterize his prose style in my introduction to the Rus
sian text.

"I like that," he said.

We never found the Russian equivalent of "straight
talk," and in the spring of 1925 the publication of my Since
Lenin Died,, an exposure of Stalin's conspiracy to seize per
sonal power, put a quick end to Eliena's job at the Embassy
and the hope that any word chosen by either of us could
be printed in Moscow.

Four other incidents involving Hemingway had enough
emotional impact to stand clear in my memory of those
days and places in Paris. He showed me in his room, the
day it came, a letter from Scribner's, who had read In Our

The Great and Small in Ernest Hemingway 49

Time and wanted to publish his next book or books. That
the courtly firm of Charles Scribner's Sons, who had pub
lished my Enjoyment of Poetry and The Sense of Humor,
and whom I had abandoned as too genteel for my more
revolutionary books, should take on a piece of stark writing
like "Up in Michigan" seemed to me incredible. I had
forgotten that in bringing out an American edition of In
Our Time (originally published in France) Horace Liver-
ight had eliminated that shocking story altogether. Still my
surprise was not unjustified, for having taken on Heming
way, Max Perkins backed him to the limit, and I guess
Scribner's did more toward debowdlerizing American fic
tion than any other publisher.

I was trying to write fiction myself at the time, being
halfway through a novel and having a couple of short sto
ries in my desk. I gave one of them to Hemingway to read,
and naturally remember his bringing it back with words of
praise.

"I'm not saying I like it because I like you, either," he
said, which gave me two grounds for complacence.

In another clear memory, I was sitting with Lincoln
Steffens in a cafe on the Boulevard Montparnasse telling
him how much I liked Ernest.

"He's such a simple, unaffected, down-to-earth person,"
I said, or words to that effect.

Steffens answered, "That's true, Max, but he has a bad
streak in him."

"Has he?" I said in surprise, but I did not pursue the
subject. I never thought Steff's sententious remarks were
quite so wise as he thought they were. I have since supposed
he was referring to Ernest's heartless mockery of his old

50 GREAT COMPANIONS

friend Sherwood Anderson in The Torrents of Spring,
which I read only much later when I heard it described as
"the meanest book ever written." I thought it one of the
poorest books ever written. It sits like a puddle of escaped
water in the careful architecture of Hemingway's writings.

Another Parisian incident I remember vividly is this: I
was sitting alone at a little table far out on the sidewalk in
front of the Cafe du Dome when Ernest happened by. He
seemed to be loitering and I asked him to sit down for a
drink. He told me he had just waked up remorseful after
spending most of the night on Montmartre. My memory
is not verbatim here, as his would be, but he said in effect:
"You can't help feeling desirous of some of the girls in
those dance halls, and I always come home disgusted with
myself for having such feelings, don't you?" It struck me
as a strange thing for the author of "Up in Michigan" to
say, and I answered (this I do remember verbatim) :

"No, I don't, Ernest. I enjoy lustful feelings, and what's
more I don't think you're talking real."

To my regret, Ernest jumped up suddenly and, waving
me back into my own world with a laugh, continued more
briskly his walk up the street.

I have no interpretation of that incident only the vivid
memory and a regret that with my brusque remark, for
which I had no valid grounds, I blocked a tendency of
our friendship to become more confiding than it had been.

On another occasion we were standing, two or three of
us, at the counter of a little Tabac around the corner from
the Closerie des Lilas. This time it was I who was telling
about the night before. I had attended one of the famous
parties given by the intemperate and delicate painter, Jules

The Great and Small in Ernest Hemingway 51

Pascin, in his apartment on the slope of Montmartre. Be
sides being the most generous, Pascin was the most candidly
interested in the physiological aspects of sex, of all the
dwellers on that sacred mountain. He would invite the
entire artistic population to these parties, and entertain
them, not only with a magnificent dinner the first big
meal many of them would have had for months but with
plenty of liquor and plenty of nakedness, and a general at
mosphere of abandon. I don't think Pascin was more in
terested in sexual experience than anybody else; he was
merely free of the slightest reticence about it. This partic
ular party, at any rate, although beautified by a couple of
sylphlike ladies who removed their clothes for purposes of
decoration, was more swimming in anger than lust. Every
body got to scrapping, and as morning approached the war
fare simmered down to a violent altercation between a
large drunken hulk of a Bulgarian and a small pale trem
ulous Britisher who was frightened for his life. They were
fighting the First World War over again, and the Bulgar,
who could have killed the small Englishman with a blow,
was threatening drunkenly to do so.

"As I was the only one anywhere near the size of the
big Bulgar," I told Ernest, "it looked as though it was up to
me to do something . . ."

"And you didn't do it!" Ernest broke in with gruff and
sudden scorn.

"Will you please let me finish my story?" I said, vexed
more by the interruption than the reflection on my prow
ess. I suppose I was intending to boast a little in a properly
casual way, and didn't want my boast to take the childish
form of "I did too!"

52 GREAT COMPANIONS

My story was that when the mighty Bulgar, bellowing
for a renewal of the war between Bulgaria and Great Brit
ain, found himself laid on the floor with an American sit
ting on his chest, he merely squeaked in a small infantile
voice: "Mais, vous n'etes pas gentil, Monsieur!" He re
peated that three times, and not a word or motion else. He
didn't even feel of the back of his head where it hit the
floor.

I had also in mind to describe the melee which followed.
The naked sylphs, anticipating a massacre, leaped right
over us on the way to their clothes, and little Pascin, too
drunk to know who was who, rushed to the further defense
of his British guest by pounding me on the back with harm
less fists. It was a picturesque mix-up and would have
amused anybody polite enough to listen. Why then this
crazy interruption: "And you didn't do it!" It brought
back to my mind what Steff ens had said about Hemingway,
and I wished I had asked him to explain it.

From there this story jumps to 193? when Ernest pub
lished his Death In The Afternoon, a celebration of bull
fights and the "religious ecstasy" of killing of killing,
moreover, as a protest against death. I happened in the
same year to pay a visit to Spain, and took a try at watching
a bullfight. Like most lovers of beautiful animals, I was
angered by the spectacle. I was violently on the bull's side,
sharing with specific passion his desire to run a horn
through the dressed-up smart-alecks who were tormenting
him. In general I think tormenting less witty animals for
his enjoyment, or to show himself off a hero, is one of man's
poorest employments. Therefore when Ernest's treatise in
sentimental praise of bullfighting arrived in my hands I

The Great and Small in Ernest Hemingway 53

was aroused to express my own conception, both of bull
fighting and of Ernest as the book revealed him. I called
my essay "Bull In The Afternoon," and it was published
in the New Republic in June 1933.

My thought about Ernest was that, being extremely sen
sitive as an artist has to be, sensitive enough to have been,
as he told me, "scared to death" under fire, his reaction had
been to overcorrect this trait to turn himself into a blus
tering roughneck crying for more killing and largely dedi
cated to demonstrating his ability to take any quantity of
carnage in his powerful stride.

This was a fairly simple and almost obvious inference
from the facts I knew, but I did not know then that Ernest
had been almost blown to pieces, had had 237 fragments of
shell removed from his body, and spent weeks in a hospital
in such a mental state that he could not sleep in the dark.
He had never said a word to me about his wounds or about
this harrowing experience. Indeed I learned of it only re
cently when reading Philip Young's critical study, Ernest
Hemingway. In that studious little book, however, I found
my intuitive inference carefully reinforced, and my thesis
applied, not only to Death In The Afternoon,, but to all of
Hemingway's books, to everything he wrote between In
Our Time and The Old Man and The Sea. "It is a flight
from violence and evil which . . . Hemingway's life and
Hemingway's work eternally rehearse."

Such surprising things resulted from my anticipation of
this thesis, that I want to recall the gist of it in my own
words.

"There are gorgeous pages in Ernest Hemingway's book
about bullfights," it began, " big humor and reckless

54 GREAT COMPANIONS

straight talk of what things are, genuinely heavy ferocity
against prattle of what they are not. Hemingway is a full-
sized man hewing his way with flying strokes of the poet's
broad axe which I greatly admire. Nevertheless, there is an
unconscionable quantity of bull to put it as decorously as
possible poured and plastered all over what he writes
about bullfights. By bull I mean juvenile romantic gushing
and sentimentalizing of simple facts."

That was my beginning; and I subsequently asked:
"Why does our iron advocate of straight talk about what
things are, our full-sized man, our ferocious realist, go
blind and wrap himself in clouds of juvenile romanticism
the moment he crosses the border of Spain on the way to
a bullfight? It is of course a commonplace that Hemingway
lacks the serene confidence that he is a full-sized man. Most
of us too delicately organized babies who grow up to be
artists suffer at times from that small inward doubt. But
some circumstance seems to have laid upon Hemingway
a continual sense of the obligation to put forth evidences
of red-blooded masculinity. . . . This trait of his charac
ter has been strong enough to form the nucleus of a new
flavor in English literature, and it has moreover begotten
a veritable school of fiction writers a literary style, you
might say, of wearing false hair on the chest."

My conclusion, like my introduction, contained a hint
of the reasons why, notwithstanding that monotonous twist
in his nature, I hold Hemingway in such high esteem.
Other poets, I observed, having gone through the "insen
sate butchery" of the First World War, had come out
mourning the tragedy and horror of it. Their bitter words
had been "the true aftermath in poetry of the Great War

The Great and Small in Ernest Hemingway 55

not the priggish trivialities of the Cult of Unintelligibility,
not the cheap moral of decorum (that shallow cult so ad
mirably exterminated root and branch by Ernest Heming
way in a paragraph of this book), not the new Bohemian-
ism of the synthetic gin period . . . but the confession in
blood and tears of the horror unendurable to vividly living
nerves of the combination of civilized life with barbaric
slaughter.

"Will it be too much like a clinic if I point out that
Ernest Hemingway is one of the most sensitive and vivid-
living of these poets, one of the most passionately intolerant
too, of priggery and parlor triviality and old maids' morals,
and empty skulls hiding in unintelligibility? I am not
strong for literary psychoanalysis, but I must record a guess
that Death In The Afternoon belongs also among those
expressions of horror."

The meaning seems clear enough, and I cannot imagine,
as I read the essay over, how anyone could have inferred
that I was talking about anything but prowess, and the need
felt by most sensitive children to demonstrate this manly
quality. In my autobiography I have told how strong the
need was in my case, and described a lonely act of pug
nacious daring to which it impelled me. If I made bold to
psychoanalyze Ernest, it was only because I had so perfectly
shared the feeling I was imputing to him.

Imagine my astonishment, then, when Bruce Bliven, Sr.,
the New Republic's editor, called me up and asked whether
I had intended to accuse Hemingway of sexual impotence!
Archibald MacLeish, it appeared, had drawn this conclu
sion from my essay and had written a letter of outrage
full page, single space demanding to defend his hero

56 GREAT COMPANIONS

against this "great and irremediable injury." The crux of
my crime my "arch sentence" according to MacLeish's
letter was this: "It is of course a commonplace that Heming
way lacks the serene confidence that he is a full-sized man."
Since I had just reiterated my assertion that Hemingway is
a full-sized man, I don't know how this could be construed
even supposing I had been talking about sex as an im
putation of impotence.* But Archie managed to read it
that way, and commented: "Of those more personal evi
dences of virility to which Mr. Eastman so daintily and in
directly refers I have no personal knowledge. I refer him
however to the birth records of the cities of Paris and Kan
sas City where he can satisfy his curiosity in secret."

Bruce Bliven, who was as bewildered by the letter as I,
begged me to say something to Archie that would head off
his intention to defend Hemingway against a charge that
had never been made. "That would really damage him,"
he said. So we each wrote a letter to MacLeish so contrived
as to bring him back to his naturally cool judgment.

"I am both astonished and much distressed," Bruce
wrote. "None of us in the office read into the Hemingway
article the significance that you found in it. I have asked
everyone I could about it, and I do not find anyone who
interpreted it as you did. Among those I have consulted
are Edmund Wilson, Robert Morse Lovett, Robert Cant-
well, George Soule and Slater Brown."

My letter read:

* In republishing "Bull In The Afternoon" in a volume of essays, I changed
the words full-sized man, in that "arch sentence," to made out of iron,
hoping, at the expense of clear sequence, to avoid the least suspicion that I
might be talking about sex.

The Great and Small in Ernest Hemingway 57

Dear Archibald MacLeish:

I was shocked and astounded by your letter to Bruce
Bliven. Nothing could be more remote from my mind or
nature than to sprinkle innuendoes or peddle scandal in
my writings. I have a genuine affection as well as a vast
literary admiration for Ernest. . . .

You made me mad, but on reflection I realize that some
particularly mean recent scandal-mongering must have put
you in a mind to misread my article. I beg you to believe
that I did not know there was such a rumor in the world.

To this MacLeish replied very courteously, accepting my
assurance that I had not intended the injury, although add
ing: "Nothing I have read in print in my life has ever
shocked and angered me as much as your article." By that
time, however, he must have communicated his misconcep
tion to Ernest, for a letter now arrived from Havana ad
dressed "To the Editors of the New Republic," and con
taining a couple of ironical jabs which those on the staff
would understand:

Sirs:

Would it not be possible for you to have Mr. Max East
man elaborate his nostalgic speculations on my sexual in
capacity? Here they would be read (aloud) with much en
joyment (our amusements are simple) and I should be glad
to furnish illustrations to brighten up Mr. Eastman's prose
if you considered them advisable. Mr. Alexander Woolcott
and the middle-aged Mr. Eastman having both published
hopeful doubts as to my potency is it too much to expect
that we might hear soon from Mr. Stark Young?
Yours etc. . . .

Ernest Hemingway

58 GREAT COMPANIONS

After reading this, I wrote the following letter to Ernest,
which he never answered:

Dear Ernest:

Your letter to the New Republic was all right, if you
really thought I said or implied any such thing. But you
might have remembered me better than that. I never heard
the breath of a rumor that you were sexually or any other
way impotent, although I have long been familiar with
the news that I am and gymnastic enough to be syphilitic
at the same time. The idea strikes me as a joke. It is hu
manity's last tribute to those who do something.

I suppose it is fresh to psycho-analyze a man by way of
literary criticism, especially one whom you esteem as a
friend, but I think there is plenty of cruelty in the world
without your helping it along, and I am within my rights
to say so with as much force as I can.

The next chapter of this narrative opens four years later,
in August 1937, when I was calling on Maxwell Perkins,
editor and vice-president of Charles Scribner's Sons. Max
was a shy and sensitive soul, so shy that his lips would trem
ble sometimes when he talked. To offset this, and perhaps
also in protest against the genteel traditions of his office, he
liked to keep a well-worn felt hat on the back of his head
while sitting at his desk. He was an astute and yet gen
erously even tenderly sympathetic editor-publisher as
many have testified. He had suggested that I make an an
thology to be sold in conjunction with a new edition of my
Enjoyment of Poetry, a book which Scribner's had brought
out in 1913, the year he joined the firm, and which he had
watched over with affection ever since.

The Great and Small in Ernest Hemingway 59

He was sitting behind his desk facing the door, and I was
on his right facing the same way. Our mood was mellow,
and it was more than a surprise when a big, burly, and also
very peppy, Ernest Hemingway strode in and greeted me
with:

"Hello, you great big son-of-a-bitch!"

He smiled when he said that, or I chose to think he did,
and I answered:

"Hello, Ernest! Big? Why you're twice as big as you used
to be!" And I felt his arm to see if it was still hard, notwith
standing his increased bulk.

"What are you doing here? Where are you going?" I
asked.

"Over to Spain," he said, "to see what your P.O.U.M.*
is doing. Is that your outfit, the P.O.U.M.?"

"I haven't any outfit, Ernest," I said. "I merely try to
tell the truth."

"Uh-huh," he said.

"You aren't really running with that Stalin gang, are
you?" I asked, and he said very emphatically:

"NO!"

"I'm mighty glad to hear it," I said,

We discussed Andres Nin, my friend recently taken from
jail and murdered by the Stalinists, one of the finest men
in the revolutionary movement. Ernest said he had heard
him highly spoken of everywhere.

"I was sorry I missed you last winter in Key West," I said.
"I enjoyed meeting your wife and seeing your house and
children."

*A group of Spanish revolutionists who, disillusioned with Stalin's dic
tatorship, were inclined to do justice to Trotsky's position.

60 GREATCOMPANIONS

He answered with pleasing sincerity: "Yes, I was very
sorry too."

But then suddenly, as though he had forgotten an errand,
he came closer and said: "I want to show you something."

He opened a button of his shirt and laid bare some
rather coarse and surprisingly dark hair on his chest.

"Is that false hair?" he asked, and he brushed his fingers
through it. Then he opened a button of my shirt we were
all three laughing, or at least I still thought we were and
I said: "I guess you've got me there!"

His laugh died and he said:

"Look here, what did you say I was sexually impotent
for?"

"Ernest, you know damn well I didn't say that or any
thing like it. You ought to be ashamed of yourself. We've
been friends long enough for you to know I don't deal in
dirty innuendoes."

"Yes, you did, and you played right into the hands of the
gang that were saying it."

"I never heard it said. I never dreamed anybody ever
said it. Didn't you get my letter?"

"Yes, and I thought that was nasty too. Moreover, you
tried to kiss my wife in a taxicab in Paris."

"I never was in a taxicab with your wife, and never had
an impulse to kiss her."

"Yes, you did, and you go around saying things behind
my back. If I had your essay here, I'd show you what you
said."

"Here it is," I said, picking up Art and the Life of Ac
tion, my volume of essays, which happened to be lying on

The Great and Small in Ernest Hemingway 61

Perkins' desk. "Show me show Max, and let him judge
whether I said or insinuated that you are impotent."

He took the book and leafed the essay through.

"You've taken it out," he muttered. . . . Then: "Here it
is. I'll show you."

"Show it to Max," I said.

"No, I won't, I'll show it to you," he said. "Listen to
this," and he read aloud the passage beginning:

"But some circumstances seems to have laid upon Heming
way a continual sense of the obligation to put forth evi
dences of red-blooded masculinity."

and ending:

"This trait of his character has been strong enough to form
the nucleus of a new flavor in English literature, and it has
moreover begotten a veritable school of fiction-writers a
literary style, you might say, of wearing false hair on the
chest."

"What does that mean," he said, "some circumstance?"

"It means I haven't an idea what the circumstance is,"
I said. "That it does not mean sexual impotence is shown
by what I say in my very first paragraph: 'Hemingway is a
full-sized man whom I greatly admire/ "

"Never mind that," he said, "I'm talking about this right
here."

He had been growing more and more truculent, and I
was not entirely surprised when he burst out, "You know

62 GREAT COMPANIONS

damn well what you meant/* and pushed the open book
into my face insultingly, though not hard enough to hurt.

My response, although angry and instantaneous, was cir
cumspect. I knew that Ernest could knock me out in a half-
second in a boxing match, but I can wrestle. I grappled
with him, clinging so close he couldn't hit me. After some
swaying and grunting I threw him on his back across Max
Perkins 7 desk, and down on his head on the floor. My fin
gers were at his throat and I had some vague idea, although
by that time no wish, to do him violence. More accurately,
I think I was wondering how much my "honor" demanded
that I should do. I forgot all about the necessity, if that is
what it was, of hitting him in the face with a book.

Ernest solved the problem by smiling up at me, the old
friendly smile, and reaching up to pat my shoulder. I
thought he meant: "Well, you're not as soft as I thought
you were/' or perhaps: "Okay, both my shoulders are on
the floor." The gesture served, at any rate, to restore me to
my natural world, a world in which fighting is unpleasant
and friends try to understand each other. At the same mo
ment gentle and tremulous Max Perkins leaned down and
urged me in my ear:

"Max, please! Please don't do this!"

As I remember it, Whitney Darrow, Sr., was conducting
a similar propaganda from the side toward the door, and the
doorway was probably filled with the joyously anxious faces
of several secretaries and stenographers. It was socially, to
say the least, a distressing situation. I got up promptly and
with happy relief. Ernest scrambled to his feet too, and we
both started picking up books, blotters, pens, pencils for
the desk had been swept clean by our dive across it.

The Great and Small in Ernest Hemingway 63

"You don't need to pick up those things, boys," Perkins
said. "The girls can do that."

"I'm glad," I said, "because I'm winded," and I returned
to my chair.

Ernest, smiling that same friendly smile, came over as
soon as I sat down and patted me on the shoulder again.
But then once more as though he had forgotten some
thing he walked off to the space in front of the desk and
began shouting insults at me.

"I hit you in the face with your own book," he shouted,
"I let you off easy too, see?"

On reflection, I judge he was talking for the audience at
the door or in the adjoining rooms, but at the time it
seemed to me that these shifts of emotion were simply crazy.

"Ernest, I think you're a lunatic," was all I said. But his
rage, or whatever emotion it was, increased with the ex
pression of it. When he arrived at an obscene epithet con
sidered to be the ultimate in the way of challenge to battle,
instead of diving in again, I turned to Perkins:

"Max, who is calling on you, Ernest or I?"

Max looked infinitely embarrassed, and in the pause
Ernest said:

"All right, I know. I'll get out."

Which, after adjusting his collar and tie, he did.

I said to Max when he was gone: "That was a little re
mote from our anthology of poetry, wasn't it?"

He answered, with comforting irrelevance:

"Well, anyway, you were on topi"

As I went out, Hemingway, who was now in another
office, shouted something about "scratching people's eyes
out." It was a taunt, obviously, at my grappling with him

64 GREAT COMPANIONS

instead of standing off and socking him, a taunt that would
soon grow up into a full-sized fantasy. A merited taunt, per
haps, but I cannot honestly say that I regret that life-saving
"choice of weapons/' Max Perkins comforted me somewhat
when I called to see him a few weeks later.

"I don't like to discuss the embarrassing thing that hap
pened when you were here before, Max," he said. "But I do
want to tell you that I think you acted magnificently. You
were Arthurian. You couldn't let a thing like that pass
without doing something, and you did just enough."

It might have looked Arthurian, but there was nothing
so clear-purposed in me. I was angry, scared and bewildered
chiefly, I think, bewildered: What is a civilized man sup
posed to do in such circumstances?

I have been able to relate this incident in such detail be
cause, interpreting Ernest's erratic behavior as I did, I had
a hunch that he would invent fantasies, and I went home
and wrote down exactly what happened and was said.

My hunch was correct, and so far as the hero of this essay
goes, the significant part of the story begins here. Eliena
and I had dinner that evening in Croton with our neigh
bors, Eric and Jere Knight, and I naturally regaled them
with my adventure. Two mornings later Eric went to town
and towards noon I was startled by telephone calls from the
Post and the World-Telegram asking for an account of
what had happened at Scribner's. They were printing the
story and they didn't want to get it wrong. I outlined the
main facts impromptu to the Post' s reporter, and to the
World-Telegram (my special friends), I read over the tele
phone the gist of what I had written. Hemingway was in
bad standing with newspapermen at the time because of

The Great and Small in Ernest Hemingway 65

his reported habit of knocking down reviewers who didn't
like his books. It is not too much to say that the whole news
paper world was wishing somebody would knock down
Ernest Hemingway. I did my best to convince the two re
porters who called me that I had dismally failed to fulfill
this civic duty.

But it did little good. Both papers carried on the front
page a hilariously laughing picture of me taken from the
jacket of my Enjoyment of Laughter, and alongside one of
Ernest in a dismal grouch. The Post's headline read:

"Unimportance of Being Ernest Hemingway Shown
When Eastman Unbeards a Chest. Literary Hair-Pulling
Sends Bullfight Lover Asprawl When Max Goes Picador."

Its long story concluded: "Mr. Eastman is planning an
article to be entitled 'Enjoyment of Thrashing Ernest/ "
The World-Telegram was more subdued, but both papers,
and indeed every paper in the country served by the prin
cipal news agencies, carried the story substantially as I told
it. Ernest had a hard time putting his fantasy across, but he
possessed the necessary skill. He made an appointment with
a reporter from the New York Times to meet him in Scrib-
ner's editorial rooms, where for obvious reasons, he was
safe from contradiction. And as the Times was sending him
to Spain, he was sure also of a respectful listener. His ver
sion appeared the next morning under the headline:
"Hemingway Slaps Eastman in Face." Here is the story as
it appeared in the New York Times:

Mr. Hemingway commented on an essay by Mr. East
man that had been entitled "Bull in the Afternoon."
Mr. Eastman had written:

66 GREAT COMPANIONS

"Come out from behind that false hair on your chest,
Ernest. We all know you/'

The volume containing this essay happened to be on
Mr. Perkins' crowded desk. "And when I saw that," says
Mr. Hemingway, "I began to get sore."

In what he hoped was a playful manner, he said, he
bared his chest to Mr. Eastman and asked him to look at
the hair and say whether it was false.

He persuaded Mr. Eastman to bare his chest and com
mented on its comparatively hairless condition.

"We were just fooling around in a way/' Mr. Heming
way said yesterday. "But when I looked at him and I
thought about the book, I got sore. I tried to get him to
read to me, in person, some of the stuff he had written
about me. He wouldn't do it. So that's when I socked him
with the book/'

"Was he in a chair or standing up?"

"He was standing over there," pointing to a window
with a window seat in Mr. Perkins' office. "I didn't really
sock him. If I had I might have knocked him through that
window and out into Fifth Avenue. That would be fine,
wouldn't it? That would have got me in wrong with my
boss, and he might have had me arrested. So, though I was
sore, I just slapped him. That knocked him down."

"But how about throwing you over the desk?" Mr. Hem
ingway was asked, "and standing you on your head in a
corner?"

"He didn't throw anybody anywhere. He jumped at me
like a woman clawing, you know, with his open hands. I
just held him off. I didn't want to hurt him. He is ten
years older than I am. . . ."

"How about books and papers being knocked off the
desk?" Mr. Hemingway was asked. "Mr. Eastman says "

The Great and Small in Ernest Hemingway 67

"Sure, some books were knocked off. He jumped at me,
I held him off, there was a little, a little wrestle. . . .

"The man didn't have a bit of fight. He just croaked,
you know, at Max Perkins. 'Who's calling on you? Ernest
or me?' So I got out. But he didn't do any throwing
around. He just sat and took it. . . ."

Mr. Perkins and other members of the Scribner's staff
refused to do more than verify the fact that the affair had
taken place, taking the stand that "this is a personal matter
between the two gentlemen in question."

Not satisfied with this achievement, Ernest apparently
found or prepared a book with a smudge in it, and in a
subsequent interview declared that this was "Eastman's
nose-print when I slapped him in the face." Stimulated by
this bit of documentation, he discovered, according to an
other reporter, that we had agreed to say nothing about the
scuffle and that I had violated the agreement by releasing
my version to the press. By the time he reached the New
York Tribune, he had a story that was really worthy of his
talent. Here he had slapped me in the face with such force
that I "tottered backward and collapsed on the window
seat."

Eastman sat there on the window seat, trembling with
rage. He said, "Ernest, you're a big bully." I was laughing
at him all the time and I said, "Max, if you were ten years
younger I'd knock the hell out of you." He came for me
then and I backed up against the desk, still laughing. I
said: "Make this guy stop being silly. He's too old." I just
held him off. I was trying to keep from hurting him. . . .

Rather in contradiction with his concern for my pre
mature decrepitude, he concluded with a challenge to me

68 GREAT COMPANIONS

to meet him "in a closed room where no one can interfere/'
and an offer to post $1000 as a purse to go either to my fa
vorite charity or to defray my "medical and hospital costs."

To this, as quoted by the Tribune, I answered: "Tell
Hemingway I fight when I'm attacked either by a natural
born ruffian, or a self-made one."

The columnists and cartoonists, of course, and even the
sports writers, had a holiday with this "battle of the ages"
between "Ernie and Maxie," in one version in another
"the Croton Mauler and the Havana Kid." Alain in the
New Yorker showed a sturdy young man with a chest of
hair being examined by an astonished doctor, "Writer?"
the doctor exclaims. Ed Reed in "Off the Record" drew
three babies in a creche, one of them similarly decorated
and another sneering: "He swiped his dad's toupee he
heard that nurse likes he-men." "Everybody knows that
when Ernest goes swimming he takes his own seaweed with
him," was a commentator's remark that sticks in my mind,
along with Westbrook Pegler's casual allusion to Heming
way as "one of the most talented of our fur-bearing au
thors."

A farcical note was introduced into the general hilarity
by the Communists, for whom Hemingway on the way to
Spain was a shining hope (a false hope, as it turned out),
and I, having just earned an international denunciation
by Stalin as a "brigand of the pen," was enemy number
one. The New Masses chose to regard Hemingway's push
ing a book into my face as a "political gesture." And I
thought I sensed the influence of the party line when Mal
colm Cowley chose that moment to send to the New Re
public an essay beginning: "Chief among Hemingway's

The Great and Small in Ernest Hemingway 69

virtues as a writer is his scrupulous regard for fact, for
reality, for what happened."

Though on reading this I wanted to underline the words
as a writer, I cannot say that I thought Cowley was wrong.
He seemed to be probing with those phrases for the thing I
had called "straight talk," or "talking real," when it first
commanded my admiration. Even when a more recent
critic speaks of Hemingway's "stubborn honesty and per
sonal integrity," I don't wholly disagree. There is a differ
ence between a poet's honest loyalty to the reality of what
he describes or imagines, and an honorable man's loyalty to
factual truth when another's vanity is involved. Both these
virtues require discipline, judgment, self-culture, undi
vided and unforgetful exercise of will, and in one at least
Hemingway has risen very high.

Which brings me back to my initial purpose to take a
hand at defining the something that is great about Ernest
Hemingway. For me it begins in his passing through and
triumphing over the subtly influential, and yet basically de
grading, baby-talk cult of Gertrude Stein, who is generally
credited, and who credited herself, with molding his style.
When I called Hemingway "a full-sized man swinging the
poet's broad axe" I was thinking of this. I had in mind
Walt Whitman's "Song of the Broad Axe." I had in mind
Walt Whitman whose "this is no book who touches this
touches a man" sums up pioneer America's revolt, not only
against feudalism and the genteel tradition, but against all
those mincing refinements which separate the pen-and-ink
life from life in the world. And I was thinking of Mark
Twain too, who lived a full life before it occurred to him to
become a writer of books. In the Old Masses and Liberator

7O GREAT COMPANIONS

days, I coined the word "literarious" to describe the partic
ular thing, or this one of the many things, against which
"the Masses crowd/' both artists and writers, were in revolt.
In retrospect, when they are noticed at all, those two maga
zines are usually identified with Greenwich Village and the
mood of Bohemian monkeyshines that is conveyed by that
name. In reality "Greenwich Villageism" was one of the
things against which we were in revolt. And although
Hemingway's early contributions seem to have got lost in
our editorial office, I think his style has more kinship with
what was being attempted there than with the tedious bab
ble which enabled Gertrude Stein and her circle to pose as
the intrepid vanguard of literary culture in the twentieth
century.

I do not mean to deny what Ernest himself has testified,
that her teacher-like comments on his manuscripts were of
critical value to him. She did, after all, have a flair for con
veying the quality of an act or person in some perceptive
metaphor. Although floating in a sea of mediocre prose,
there are examples of this in her Three Lives. They are
even to be found in that still more tedious book The Mak
ing of Americans, which she, with touching modesty, de
scribed as "the monumental work which was the begin
ning, really, of modern writing." That she could create a
vivid sentence once in a while bears out his testimony that
she knew how it was done; it is more than many good
teachers of "writing" can do. Moreover, Ernest was just
crossing over then from commercial journalism, the craft
of writing in such a way as to please everybody a little and
not offend anybody at all, into the realm of literary art

The Great and Small in Ernest Hemingway 71

the poet's reckless saying of things the way he thinks they
ought to be said. Her obtuse disregard, not only of all
readers, but of the very terms of communication, would
naturally have allured him at such a juncture. To read the
two of them, however, you would think that Hemingway
was "molding" Gertrude, or trying to with little success,
rather than Gertrude molding Hemingway. The choppy
short sentences and endless strings of "and's," the self-
admiring repetitions, borrowed, by the way, from Matthew
Arnold, and carried by Gertrude to an inane extreme or
should we say insane, since it descended often into actual
echolalia all these rather infantine parlor tricks became
in Hemingway's more skillful hands an art of quick, harsh,
brutish realism that made In Our Time a uniquely awak
ening book.

Ernest must have been working on The Sun Also Rises
while I was in Paris, for it was published in 1926. On the
whole, as a sequel to In Our Time,, it disappointed me.
That monotonous staccato relieved only by an and-and-and
legato, which had been so impressive when employed in a
short story to convey exactly what happened in action, be
came tiresome when employed in a long novel to describe a
landscape or characterize a person or an idea. On this larger
canvas it began to appear that what Hemingway was doing
stylistically was to renounce the riches of the language. In
stead of a fertile innovation, the thing began now to seem
retrograde, an effort to write mature things in the language
of a schoolboy. I still think Hemingway's short stories, and
the story parts of his novels, are his great achievement. The
style of the short story has reached a new kind of perfection

72 GREAT COMPANIONS

in his hands. But in all his work he gradually freed himself
from what was confining in this after all rather tricky way
of being forceful and realistic. By the time he arrived at
Death In The Afternoon, realism no longer demanded that
he refrain from using a grown-up vocabulary and his
brains.

In short, when his teacher, the monumental Gertrude,
discovered that Ernest was "yellow," and, still more devas
tating, "ninety percent rotarian," a process of graduation
must have been under way. And when once more with
the accustomed modesty she acknowledged that she and
Sherwood Anderson had "formed" Hemingway, and apolo
gized for spending so much of her time on the job with the
remark that "it is so flattering to have a pupil who does it
without understanding it," the graduation must have been
about complete. For me those wild parting shots from Ger
trude Stein merely indicate the speed with which Ernest
was travelling away toward his greater destiny.

He does not belong in any little Bohemian circle of spe
cialists in admiring themselves as an "avant-garde." He is
not concerned to beat all rivals in the race to be modern,
thus to outslide them all in becoming out-of-date. He lives
in the ages; he is immune to fad. He lives outdoors on the
earth and is intolerant of hot-house culture. He is intoler
ant of New York, where he could have daily adulation as
our leading "literateur" if he wanted it. What he wants is
the rough flavor of life as men live it who have something
on their minds besides gossip about Art with a capital A.
I can best explain the quality of my admiration for Ernest
Hemingway by recalling the praise of Aeschylus in the ini
tial pages of my first book, Enjoyment of Poetry.

The Great and Small in Ernest Hemingway 73

With the participation of that poetic hero in the campaign
of defense against the Persians, and in the battles of Sala-
mis and Marathon, it seems as if Nature had achieved her
aim. There experience was at its height, but purpose was
unshaken. The little library and piazza poets and esteemers
of poetry in these days of Art, will do well to remember
the great Greek, who died the most renowned literary gen
ius of his age but had carved upon his proud tomb only this
boast, that "The grove of Marathon could bear witness to
his good soldierhood, and the long-haired Mede who felt
it."

There is a little of Aeschylus in Ernest Hemingway, in
his character and his fierce code of courage and hardihood
a little of Prometheus bound. There is a little of Homer
too, and of his translator, George Chapman, who wrote;

Give me a spirit that on life's rough sea
Loves to have his sails filled with a lusty wind
Even till his sailyard tremble, his masts crack,
And his rapt ship run on her side so low
That she drinks water and her keel ploughs air.
There is no danger to a man that knows
What life and death is there's not any law
Exceeds his knowledge.

That, apart from his short stories, is the thing I admire
in Hemingway both as a man and a writer. Philip Young
adds inflexible will power to it, when he tells us that Hem
ingway built himself up deliberately from a "fright which
seems once to have been nearly incapacitating" to a point
where veterans and professional soldiers of World War II
declared him "quite simply the bravest man they had ever

74 GREAT COMPANIONS

seen/' That he got these qualities mixed up in his mind
with being exaggeratedly masculine and going around
spoiling for a fight is just too bad. In order to be brave, he
thought he had to turn himself into a bruiser, and he seems
to have held the thought so firmly that it actually nour
ished the hair on his chest. At least so I judge from a photo
graph in my possession of a much younger Ernest posing
playfully in the nude on a beach at Marquesas Keys. It was
sent to me, amid the epistolary downpour following our
"battle of the ages/' by a lusty mutual friend of ours with
some verses which I regret cannot be quoted here. I have
testified that Ernest brought heavier chest-hair into Max
Perkins' office than I did, and I note that in advertising a
subsequent book he issued a picture of himself sleeveless at
the typewriter with a grizzly forearm whose virility I could
not even approach. But the fact visible in this earlier pic
ture is that in those days Ernest's forearm was not grizzly,
and he looked more like a statue of Apollo than a hairy
ape. He was masculine enough, well formed, adequately
equipped with both primary and secondary sexual charac
ters, but by comparison with what he seems to have become
in later years, delicately unsuggestive of a fur-bearing au
thor.

Theodore Roosevelt had a code in which courage and
hardihood received an emphasis similar to that which
Hemingway gives them. Indeed these two Americans were
in remarkable ways alike. Substitute rough-riding for bull
fighting, the Spanish-American War (the best one open to
him) for World War II, and the jungles of the Upper Ama
zon for the Green Hills of Africa you have a similar pat-

The Great and Small in Ernest Hemingway 75

tern. They both believed in "the strenuous life," and both
felt they were getting it in running down and shooting
wild animals. But Teddy's code was not narrow; it in
cluded a variety of noble virtues. He was as much con
cerned as Hemingway not to be a "mollycoddle," but he
did not think this was the whole duty of man. There is no
reason why an intense moralist like Hemingway should
concentrate on that one virtue either. But if he had to, in
order to build a rampart between himself and the little
library and the piazza poets above mentioned, I cannot be
deeply sorry about it. He has cut a swath through con
temporary letters like the spoor of a great animal leading
back perhaps to the jungle, but reminding us of the fragil
ity and foolishness of much that we cherish as so very
"modern" and "monumental."

Our last meeting was friendly and I would like to de
scribe it here. In Havana in 1946, Eliena and I were loiter
ing at the Bar Florida, watching the sober, slender, deli
cate-handed creator of daiquiris making them for his
clients. He made them as though he were playing a violin.
Glancing in the mirror behind the bar, I saw standing four
feet behind me a thick, stern-faced character with big
glasses, beetle-black eyes and graying black hair. Something
familiar about him . . . yes, it must be ... but so heavy-
glaring, sad, brutal, unillumined . . . Ernest Hemingway.
A kind of Ernest Hemingway.

My heart jumped a little. But I measured the space be
tween him and the open door behind him: he was in a posi
tion, if tackled, to be thrown through the door to the side
walk on his back. This calculation insured me against the

76 GREAT COMPANIONS

bewilderment which had been so painful when he insulted
me before, and I was untroubled when I turned around
and said: "Hello, Ernest/'

He stared at me while I waited as one waits for a radio to
warm up and say something. Finally he said: "Hello, Max,"
and we shook hands.

"You remember Eliena," I said, and made room for her
between us.

He greeted Eliena more warmly, and smiled when she
said: "Are you really Ernest? I looked and looked and
simply couldn't believe it was you."

"How have I changed so much?" he asked.

"You used to have blue eyes!" she said.

It summarized the change in him, she told me afterward.
But his eyes looked so opaquely black, so like discs of obsid
ian, that it sounded ludicrous and we all laughed.

"Will you have a drink?" he said.

And so we stood there a while, sipping a cocktail and
talking about our mutual friends, about the beauties of
Cuba, about his being in France and running into Ross
Sander's son, about his own son then a soldier. A man
with a camera came up and spoke to him, then backed off.
Ernest took off his big glasses.

"Now I look more like I used to," he said smiling.

We spoke of Waldo Pierce, Dos Passos, Hadley, Bill
Smith, Gerald Murphy. Ernest thought they were all aw
fully nice. He seemed awfully nice himself, although every
little while he would stare beyond us in an unseeing way
that suggested inward tension to my perhaps too diagnostic
eye.

"I'll be seeing you around," he said when we parted.

My Friendship with Edna Millay

i

n his Shores of Light Edmund Wilson relates with de
lightful candor how in youth he and his close friend, John
Peale Bishop, fell "irretrievably" in love both at once
with Edna Millay. He describes this as a common experi
ence, an "almost inevitable consequence of knowing her in
those days." To be as candid, I shall have to confess that I
tried to fall in love with Edna Millay, believing it for a
time to be my romantic destiny, but regretfully failed.
Long afterward, we became close and even intimate
friends, but I never experienced the "intoxicating effect
upon people" which Wilson says "created the atmosphere
in which she lived and composed." It seemed to me that
her frequent effect upon people was to make them a little

78 GREATCOMPANIONS

tense and self-conscious as though because she was there,
life, which had been flowing along naturally enough, had
become an enacted drama.

She was not voluptuously beautiful like her sister
Norma; she had the legs and, at times, the expression of
a maiden aunt. But her eyes were of an incredible wild
gray-green out of the forest, and they had bewitching
crinkles around them. Her torso was shapely, and her voice
as thrilling as a violin. She could indeed in moments of
high animation become beautiful, almost divinely so, as
Wilson suggests, but then all the more she seemed to me
at least in some estranging way remote. Her determina
tion to be a poet, and not some man's woman or even some
child's mother, was absolute and absolutely necessary,
I'm afraid, if a woman is to rival men in creative art.
Perhaps it was this that made simple people shy and a
trifle constrained in her presence. You felt the strength of
character behind that decision, and strength of character
is always a trifle alarming.

I first met Edna Millay at some small party in Green
wich Village. She and Norma did one of the little folk-
song-and-dance acts they had brought to New York from
the rural village in Maine where they were born and
reared. The act was skillful their harmonies perfect, their
rhythmical sense exact but I did not find it pleasing.
They seemed a little schoolgirlish, almost simpering, to
me. It set me against Edna and her writings for a long
time. I remember Floyd Dell's bringing a few fragments
of her poetry to the Liberator office one day, and my
saying:

"Why should we publish fragments of poetry? Why
doesn't she send us a poem?"

My Friendship with Edna Millay 79

"Maybe I'm prejudiced, Max," he said, "but I feel as I
would if I had offered you some unpublished fragments of
Swinburne."

Why Swinburne exactly, I cannot guess, but it is true
that Floyd was prejudiced. He was at the time, as I learned
afterwards, in love with Edna to the point of distraction.

At any rate, I remained stubborn about those fragments
and, to my present regret, they never got into the magazine
I edited. I too was prejudiced perhaps, for in 1912, when
Mitchell Kennerley published my thin first volume of
verse, Child of the Amazons., he happened to bring out si
multaneously Edna's famous schoolgirl poem, Renascence.
In the excitement about Renascence, neither he nor any
body else gave even a left-handed lift to my book; it dropped
directly and by mere force of gravitation from the printing
press into the waste basket. I do not think this prejudiced
me against Edna's poems: I merely remember that it hap
pened, and feel sure that any properly "psychological" bi
ographer would say so. It is a fact, anyway, that I did not
read a single one of her earlier poems, the poems of the
"Greenwich Village gamine" period, until she had out
grown it. Elizabeth Atkins, her enraptured eulogist, accuses
me of "imitating" a poem of hers called "I Think I Should
Have Loved You," but until preparing the present essay I
had never read it, and I cannot imagine what poem of mine
she thinks it resembles.

This early insulation from the Millay cult, both personal
and literary, enables me to speak of her more judiciously,
perhaps, than some of her later critics have. Winfield
Townley Scott, discussing her Collected Poems, in the
Saturday Review, confessed to having outgrown poems
which once had him "babbling in the streets by night."

80 GREAT COMPANIONS

And John Ciardi, in an essay in the same magazine at the
time of her death, described how in adolescence "we were
moved, we were filled, we were taken" by verses which
now seem no more important than our first cigarette. "One
finds himself less inclined to criticism than nostalgia. At
least it will be so for all of us who were very young and
very merry and aren't exactly that any more, but who once
long ago opened those little black books with their titles
pasted to the binding, and suddenly found the wind blow
ing through everybody's hair and a wonderful girl running
to us through the wind." John Crowe Ransom, though not
so nostalgic about his youth, seems equally filled with pride
in the fact that he is grown up, and adds to it a boastful-
ness about being "intellectual" and "male" so reiterative
as almost to cause the reader to blush.

I approach the question of Edna's character and her
poems without any of these obsessions. That she was a rage
in the teens escaped me, as I have said. That her "reading
appearances were triumphs" though not "of trailing
gowns and far-flung gestures," as Ciardi asserts, for there
were no gestures and the gowns hung straight down and
stopped at the floor also left me unmoved, for I did not
entirely like the way she read her poems. They are melodic
and she read them so slowly that for me the melody was
lost. I also find it possible to be a man without inferring
that women are thereby proven inferior. And as to the
"lack of intellectual interest" which, according to Ransom,
sums up her limitations "it is that which the male reader
misses in her poetry" it was certainly not true of her na
ture, and I find it less true of what she wrote than of most
lyric poetry. I agreed with Thomas Hardy when he said

My Friendship with Edna Millay 81

that, next to our skyscrapers, the poetry of Edna St. Vincent
Millay was the thing he admired most in America. And I
do not think anything has happened among us to alter that
judgment.

To me, I had better confess, the whole "modern" move
ment in poetry has been a decline. Its going indoors, its
abandoning under pretext of using contemporary plain
talk the effort toward intense and perfect utterance, its
consecration of the mental blur, its pouring out of meta
phors without regard to their aptness, its loftiness above
song, its conception of artistic creation as progress and of
itself as the vanguard of a movement of reform, its living
of poetry instead of living life, its strewing a poem with
obscure references that no man occupied with life has time
to look up, all these traits which may almost be summed up
in the single word pedantry a quality to be seen at its
most tedious in T. S. Eliot's recent On Poetry and Poets
will be condemned as a blemish, I think, if our culture
recovers its health. To me then, the growing-up of which
the modern critics are so proud seems to have proceeded
in a downward direction. They were wiser and more manly
in their adolescence a time of "tremendous vitality/* ac
cording to Ciardi, and "passionate living 5 ' than in this
premature decrepitude which he describes as a "develop
ment toward the ambivalent consciousness and the pessi
mistic intellect."

It is important to distinguish the "intellectualism" of
which these literary moderns boast from thinking pro
foundly, or knowing how to think. It is almost the oppo
site thing: taking delight in the unregulated mixture of
ideas, images, and feelings in a mind stocked with knowl-

82 GREAT COMPANIONS

edge and yet impassioned. It came in as a vogue with the
rediscovery o John Donne "the poet of intellectualized
persons/' as Ransom describes him, and he was indeed a
master of this kind of poetic art. It is a magnificent ex
perience to read him, to enter into his mind and puzzle
him out, but it is remote both from trenchant thinking
and from song. How remote it is from thinking as it is em
ployed by those who desire to attain knowledge or under
standing may be inferred from a glance at the first three
names on the list Ransom gives of Donne's followers, the
"intellectualist poets" of our time: Ezra Pound, whose
learning is phony* and whose mind when exposed in prose
is without edge or depth; Allen Tate, who can rarely say
clearly even in a prose essay what he is driving at; William
Butler Yeats, who was the dupe of every unscientific notion
afloat among the quacks and crackpots who gathered
around him. "Intellectual power," Ransom thinks, is char
acteristic of these poets, and he adds for in all this he is
still talking about Edna St. Vincent Millay that their
"field of reference is too wide to be commanded by the
innocent female mind."

If these "intellectualist" poets were employing their in
tellects for purposes of understanding, they could hardly
fail to know that their "snooty" attitude toward Edna
Millay is not a critical judgment of her poetry, but a part
of their recoil against the entire poetic idiom to which she
belongs.f It is the focal manifestation of a major turn in

* On Pound's learning, the reader will find delight in consulting Robert
Graves, "These Be Your Gods, O Israeli" in The Crowning Privilege. Graves
strikes me as the one critic of poetry bold and unobsequious enough to
fulfill the real function of criticism in this obsequious age.
fOn the question of poetic idiom, Frederick A. Pottle's The Idiom of

My Friendship with Edna Millay 83

the cycle of taste focal because she was the most promi
nent, and is in my opinion one of the greatest poets of the
preceding cycle. I know nothing in American literature to
compare in scope and grandeur of intellectual grasp and
eloquence with her "Epitaph for the Race of Man.' 7 Brief
though it is, this is the only poem in the language since
Milton that can be compared in mental boldness, with
Dante and Lucretius. And its brevity is intrinsic. With the
top-hamper of superstition and ideological wish-construc
tions swept away, how much is there to say about man and
the universe? How characteristic that these brain-proud
exponents of the New Criticism have none of them an ade
quate remark to make about this great poem, its epic
wealth of imagery, its perfected dreadfulness, the virile
courage of the mind that dared at last to speak it out.

I have to say then, still only getting started on my
memoir, that Edna had as clear, hard, alert and logical a
mind as I have encountered in man or woman. She sur
prised me continually too with her large and accurate
knowledge about many things about nature, about lan
guage, about everything relating to her art. She had in
these fields the instincts and discipline of a scholar. Far
from being "indifferent to intellectuality," to quote an
other of John Crowe Ransom's naively revealing phrases,
she was, for my taste, a little too austerely addicted to
mental as well as moral discipline. She had a trace of the
schoolmarm about her. It was this quality surprisingly
associated with her boldness in the enjoyment of sensual
pleasures that made it impossible for me to fulfill my
dream of falling in love with her.

That dream shone down upon me all of a sudden out of

84 GREAT COMPANIONS

spring. I had lost, or destroyed, the first great love of my
life, and had come to Europe in self-distrustful loneliness
adventure-thirsty, however, as in emotional freedom I
always am. The spring was 1922 and the mountain was
twenty miles down the coast from Genoa, where I had
gone to attend the famous post-war conference of the Great
Powers. Edna's Second April was published in that year,
and whether I had that volume with me in Genoa, or had
read elsewhere some of the maturer lyrics it contained, I
do not know. But I had achieved an understanding of the
true reasons for her great fame. Somebody told me that
she was "batting around" Paris; I had been batting around
Paris, too, and was going back there again. The idea of lov
ing someone more like myself than my lost love, a compan
ion of my ambition as well as of my mind and body, had
always intrigued me. And so much the better if she was
famous for I like to admire those whom I love. I like to
love those whom I admire. Thus I found myself loving
Edna Millay as I made my slow way up that mountain
path, and composing a sonnet which I thought I might
send her.

"I climbed a sunny-shouldered hill with you," it began,
and what happened in between I don't remember, but this
is how it ended:

Above the clash, the rancour, and the rage
Of this embattled and empuddled age,
Above all wounds and weapons it could send,
You have held high and beautifully strong,
And flowing rose-and-silver in the wind,
The bold clear slender pennant of your song.

My Friendship with Edna Millay 85

I remember that as one o the happiest days, and one of
the happiest loves, of my life a love like Dante's for
Beatrice, never spoken to or touched. It was a little briefer
than Dante's but it filled my heart until I got back to
Paris. There I did find Edna "batting around," meeting
her I do not know quite where, but probably on Montpar-
nasse at the Cafe du Dome, where all the American bohe-
mians, writers and artists and small-income expatriates,
were spending their handfuls of francs. We dined together,
making conversation successfully, and after the coffee, I
asked her to come to my room on the rue des Beaux
Arts and read me some poems. I was not, alas, falling in
love with her, but still only hoping that I might. She did
come, and as my room was infinitely narrow with only
the bed to sit on, we sat, or rather lay, on the bed together
with our heads propped against a pillow. She read to me,
after one or two less personal poems, a sonnet which de
fends, or pays its respects to, a love that is momentary and
involves no complications. But by that time I knew that my
dream had flown. Though we were almost in each other's
arms, we were not together. We were still making conversa
tion. Some fixed vacuum between us held apart the at
mospheres we breathed. Another fifteen years would pass
before, short-circuited by a slight but completely spon
taneous gesture, her voluptuous magnetism would leap to
me, and I would feel in full warm stream the "intoxicating
effect" that Edmund Wilson speaks of.

Disappointed of my romance, I did not linger in Paris,
but resumed my pursuit of a more impersonal dream my
pilgrimage to Moscow. For that was my larger purpose; I
had only paused at Genoa. I was on my way to find the

86 GREAT COMPANIONS

truth about the new socialist society being born in Russia,
when that irrelevant bright light beamed across my path on
the Italian mountainside.

I spent almost two years in Russia, and another on the
Riviera before I saw Edna again. She had married in the
meantime my dearest friend, Eugen Boissevain, an incom
parable companion. He and I had shared an apartment on
St. Lukes Place, sharing also the services of a divine cook
named Annie, and had lived an excellent life together for
the two years before I set out for Russia. Thus it seemed
now almost as though Edna had moved into my family. But
in Moscow I too had married a still more incomparable
companion, and one with the same rare habit of taking
life straight, or taking it with laughter in the place of
prayer. We all four became the best and most unrivalrous
of friends. I don't believe it would have been possible to
say which one liked which other best. For a year Eliena
and I played with the idea of buying the farm next to
"Steepletop," Eugen and Edna's place at Austerlitz, and
only gave up when the seashore at Martha's Vineyard
clasped us in its arms. We spent weeks and weekends to
gether in their farmhouse in the foothills of the Berkshires,
others in our little house with a tennis court at Croton-on-
Hudson, and one long memorable holiday swimming and
basking in the nude on a lonely beach at Martha's Vine
yard.

It was during those years that Edna wrote her greatest
poetry. The Buck in the Snow came out in 1929. It was
enthusiastically welcomed in England, although reviewed
with a note of disappointment in America, the reason for
this being, I think, that she had been silent long enough to

My Friendship with Edna Millay 87

become a myth, and it was the myth of a more lightly tune
ful and less warmly thoughtful poet than she had grown
up to be. There was more passion and less wit in these
larger and freer rhythms. There were more thoughts and
not perhaps so many bright ideas. I suppose it was a ques
tion what one had originally perceived as the essence of
her genius. For those to whom it was her very great lyrical
cleverness that delicate skill as a grammatical engineer,
which people who do not write poetry always admire so
much and take for the very fluid of inspiration for them,
no doubt, the new warmth and thoughtfulness seemed a
decline. And those super-modern critics who "babbled in
the streets at night" over her immature verses partly, one
cannot help thinking, because that was the fashion were
off already on the trail of a new fashion. As one who re
mained, by the grace of God, in the earlier fashion, I
can say that the title-poem of The Buck in the Snow seems
to me one of the perfect lyrics in our language, a painting
of life and death unexcelled, indeed, anywhere. It is com
pletely her own; no one else that ever lived could have
written it.

White sky, over the hemlocks bowed with snow,

Saw you not at the beginning of evening the antlered buck

and his doe
Standing in the apple-orchard? I saw them. I saw them

suddenly go,

Tails up, with long leaps lovely and slow,
Over the stone-wall into the wood of hemlocks bowed with

snow.

Now lies he here, his wild blood scalding the snow.

88 GREAT COMPANIONS

How strange a thing is death, bringing to his knees, bring
ing to his antlers
The buck in the snow.

How strange a thing, a mile away by now, it may be,
Under the heavy hemlocks that as the moments pass
Shift their loads a little, letting fall a feather of snow
Life, looking out attentive from the eyes of the doe.

Epitaph for the Race of Man was also composed during
the years of our close friendship, as well as the sonnet
sequence Fatal Interview another classic that the poet's
adolescent admirers, in belittling her mature poetry, have
managed largely to ignore. Neither of these magnificent
works of genius is once mentioned by Horace Gregory and
Marya Zaturenska in their History of American Poetry
jpoo-rp^o. This pretentious volume, supposedly a standard
work of reference, sums up Edna St. Vincent Millay with
the remark that "Her virtues are those of an effortless,
seemingly artless charm of youth, and of lightly touched
and quickly dispelled sorrow/' and voices the prophecy
that her verse will probably "introduce other generations
of girls and young women to the phenomena of an adoles
cent self-discovery in terms of poetry." Unless it be per
sonal pique, only the general decline of critical taste
throughout the whole period can explain this astonishing
fact.

Many who felt the heartbroken passion contained in the
serenely controlled forms of Fatal Interview were puzzled
by the idea that they were composed "when the author
was living quietly with a husband of eight years standing."
Elizabeth Atkins showed a manuscript containing this
quoted phrase to Eugen, and reports that he responded "in

My Friendship with Edna Millay 89

a deeply bitten marginal comment" that the assumption it
makes is a lie. I never discussed this question with either
of my friends, but I can join my testimony to his that,
passionately and admiringly as they loved each other, "liv
ing quietly with a husband of eight years standing" is far
from a description of Edna's mind during those years. Nor
would the corresponding phrase be a description of his. He
never ceased to adore her and care for her with a unique
devotion, less like a husband's than that of a nursemaid to
ward a child of whom she is enamored. But he was a
man, and men are a nomad sex. He was, moreover, in
principle opposed to possessiveness in marriage on either
side. Freedom of emotional experience had been a cardinal
item in the private marriage vows taken by him and Inez
Milholland in the heyday of the feminist movement in
America. Glorious Inez died too soon, alas, for their youth
ful dream of a new kind of partnership to undergo a cru
cial test, but I have no reason to suppose that Eugen
offered to Edna a less openhearted love. That she, on her
side, felt no need to be possessed or circumscribed will
be obvious, I think, to anyone who lives a little with her
poetry.

A memoir, if it is forthright, has to be fragmentary, for
small bits of things stick vividly in one's memory out of all
connection with other things. We were playing one of our
very realistic games of charades at a party at our house in
Croton to which a smooth-haired young man from Yale (I
think) had been invited. The word to be enacted on our
side was Bathsheba, and in the final scene Edna was to play
the part of Bathsheba bathing on a rooftop and he of
David passing by.

go GREATCOMPANIONS

"This high table will be the rooftop/' he said excitedly.
"I'll enter from the side door, and you'll be up there in a
bathing suit. . . ."

"Bathing suitl" Edna said. "You don't take baths in a
bathing suit!"

The young man played his part of David, blushing some
what, but with heroic fortitude.

Edna and I were talking one evening about the highly
colored notions that prudishly conventional people have
about those who take sex, so to speak, in their stride. The
narrowing down, in American usage, of the words moral
and immoral to apply only to the minute question whether
one obeys a formula or his own selective good taste in sex
ual relations seemed lamentable to us both. But what
would the psychoanalysts do if people were direct and
simple about such things?

"There wouldn't be any psychoanalysts," she said.
"They're all pathologically inhibited that's why they
think sex is at the bottom of everything." And she told me
that once at a party she was sitting alone nursing a bad
headache when a young doctor approached and said that
he had been watching her and thought he might be able
to help her if she would allow it.

"If you would come into the library with me, where we
might talk privately?" he suggested.

"I'll be glad to," she said, out of curiosity rather than
the hope of relief.

When they were safely isolated and ensconced in two
large chairs, he got up and closed the door, then came back
and requested her permission to ask a few questions. After
a long and roundabout approach, he finally brought out,

My Friendship with Edna Millay 91

with much hesitation and several false starts, a momentous
remark:

"I wonder if it has ever occurred to you that you might
perhaps, although you are hardly conscious of it, have an
occasional erotic impulse toward a person of your own
sex?"

"Oh, you mean I'm homosexual!" she exclaimed. "Of
course I am, and heterosexual too, but what's that got to do
with my headache?"

One of Eugen's traits which I associated with the Dutch
side of his nature for his mother was Irish was a strong
property sense. He cared intensely, and sometimes irritat-
ingly, about everything that belonged to him. One hot
summer when Eliena and I were visiting them in Auster-
litz, and we were all four sleeping in the front part of the
house with double doors wide open, Eugen going into the
bathroom found a slit in one of the little white guest
towels that hung there. Someone apparently had used it
carelessly to wipe the blade of a safety razor. He assumed
that I had been the one and "called me down" with exces
sive intensity. At least I thought so, for I was sure I had not
done it, and my reaction was bellicose. He was equally sure
I had done it, and the conflict remained unresolved. . . .

In order to finish this story I have to digress now, and
tell the reader that in the Russian language there are no
definite or indefinite articles, no "the's" or "a's," and
therefore when familiar objects like the lamp or the teapot
are mentioned, it seems to an English ear as though these
objects were being personified. "Shall we bring teapot?"
"Shall we light lamp?" Eliena and I, as we gradually
stopped talking Russian, used often to employ in English

92 GREAT COMPANIONS

this whimsically affectionate way o speaking about our
inanimate companions. And now my story continues. . . .

Just as we were all dropping to sleep with that fading
animosity hanging around us, I said into the darkness:

"Eugenl"

"Yes," came the gruff answer.

"I'm sorry about little towel!"

It was the omitted article, I am sure, rather than my
contrition toward Eugen at least it was the two com
bined that affected Edna so deeply. She jumped out of
her bed and running across to me in her filmy nightgown
clasped me in warm arms and embraced me with joyous
affection. It was then, and from that time on, that the
barrier between us of her self-captaincy and my diffident
reserve got broken down. I felt finally the "intoxicating
effect" that Edmund Wilson speaks of, and realized alas
so late that my dream on the mountainside in Italy had
not been wholly Utopian.

Although we came close, and a shaft of love entered our
friendship, there remained some quality in her that
troubled me. Austerity, I think, is the name of it, a cer
tain rigidity about scholarly matters and matters of taste
and moral principle. I am not referring to what Edmund
Wilson calls her "tough intellectual side," for that I
adored. And I am not using the word moral in the sexually
overloaded sense. In the matter of sexual relations we all
four believed in freedom restrained by intelligence, not
convention a freedom that many imagine was attained in
America only during the roaring twenties, although an in
delicate flaunting of it was all that distinguished that
decade from other times when adventurous minds have

My Friendship with Edna Millay 93

been mature. It was in asserting the exact letter of an ideal
principle or a piece of information or an exercise of
aesthetic judgment that she was something of a puritan or
martinet. She drove herself, and drove other mortals, too
hard. She drove them with inferences from absolute stand
ards rather than judgments based on the flux of the actual
and potential. Her letter (numbered 254 in her collected
letters) to a member of the firm of Harper's who had sug
gested that she append some notes to her poems explaining
the motive and occasion of them will serve as an example.
She answered as though the poor man had violated a
fixed principle of aesthetics. In the preface to my Poems of
Five Decades I pointed out that seven hundred years ago
Dante, in publishing his love poems, had set the style for
such a book. But Edna takes a sideswipe at me too in
that letter, asserting as though it were eternal law her ex
treme taste for reticence. In another letter (numbered 253),
she answers, as though she were sitting straight in a sewing
chair, a mild proposal from Harper's of some new way to
make money out of her books. She does, to be sure, con
clude this rather irate rebuff with a smile: "Trusting that
for one year more it may be said of me by Harper &
Brothers that although I reject their proposals I welcome
their advances." But in another example of this trait that
I am going to describe, there was no easing of her austerity,
no smile at the end, although one was more particularly
called for.

I refer to her relations with the Academy of American
Poets, an institution organized, at first somewhat naively,
by a blue-eyed young woman named Marie Bullock with a
view to promoting poetry in the United States. Mrs. Bui-

94 GREAT COMPANIONS

lock had a dream in her eyes, and she had energy and
address and contacts with wealthy people. Her rather high-
sounding institution of which, after some kicking against
its seeming swankiness, I became a chancellor has con
ferred thirteen $5,000 fellowships on poets chosen by the
chancellors, and is now using a fund of $50,000 to subsidize
books of poetry which publishers admire but dare not take
the financial risk of publishing. In other ways, it has been
an unqualified boon to American poetry, and this I think
every poet and poetry lover in the country now acknowl
edges. But in her first eagerness to make sure of achieving
her aim, Marie Bullock drew up some truly formidable
"terms" on which the stipend of $5,000 was to be paid to
the lucky poets. A by-law stated that each one should "at
least three (3) times the year of his fellowship and each
time within thirty (30) days prior to the time fixed for the
payment of his next quarterly installment of the stipend,
communicate with the secretary of the corporation in
writing as to the general nature of his activities in connec
tion with the purposes of the fellowship." The Certificate
of Incorporation contained a clause even better calculated
to throw a scare into the poor poet:

The following persons shall be eligible for fellowships:
poets of proven merit, either natural born or naturalized
American citizens, not possessed of a regular income in ex
cess of five thousand dollars ($5,000), lawful money of the
United States of America, per annum. No holder of a fel
lowship shall engage in any gainful occupation for the
whole or any part of his time other than such occupation
as may be approved by a majority of the chancellors of the
corporation as not incompatible with poetic production.

My Friendship with Edna Millay 95

I never read these documents until Edna called my atten
tion to them in an indignant letter in which she declined
to serve on the Board of Chancellors. It was a withering let
ter, I must say.

This is not a "reward for poetic achievement." This
poet must sing for his supper. The pen with which he has
written poetry of conspicuous merit must now be em
ployed in writing letters to a secretary of a corporation, ex
plaining "the general nature of his activities."

Is this mature artist being treated as if he were a talented
child of undeveloped capacities? No. He is being treated
worse than that. For this is not the sum of his onerous and
humiliating obligations. Not only three times during the
year, but every day of the year, during "the year of his fel
lowship," he must be circumspect that he engage himself
in no "gainful occupation" "for the whole or any part of
his time/' which might in the opinion of a board of judges
be "incompatible with poetic production." In return for
his freedom, his freedom from poverty, this "poet of proven
merit" must conduct himself, throughout the period of his
fellowship, precisely as if he were a prisoner on pa
role. . . .

I think of what Shelley said, in "An Exhortation":

Yet dare not stain with wealth or power
A poet's free and heavenly mind.
Spirits from beyond the moon,
Oh, refuse the boonl

Her letter, although addressed to me, was sent to all the
chancellors and also to Marie Bullock. In a covering letter

96 GREAT COMPANIONS

to me she was full of fun, and in one to Mrs. Bullock she
tempered the ferocity of her eloquence with the pleasant
question: "Can you not, in some way, persuade the Board
of Directors to bestir themselves, repeal a few articles, drop
a few lawyers out of a few high office windows, do some
thing to make more simple and more acceptable this mar
velous and shocking award?"

Mrs. Bullock revealed her magnanimity, or her flexible
intelligence rather, by bestirring herself exactly as Edna
suggested except only that the lawyers received a slightly
more considerate treatment. The offending "terms'* were
removed both from the by-laws and the Certificate of In
corporation, and only a legitimate stipulation retained that
the recipients of the awards should not be "engaged in any
gainful occupation incompatible with poetic production."
By the time I got around to answering Edna's letter, these
changes had been made. But the story does not end there,
and for that reason I want to quote my answer.

Dear Edna,

I did receive your letter to me in the character of "chan
cellor" although belatedly and in a warm country where
I was on a moral holiday.

I felt humiliated by it because I so impulsively agreed
with everything you said and yet I could not remember
ever having seen either the by-laws or the certificate of in
corporation of the Academy of American Poets. I have cer
tainly never been called upon to do any of the dreadful
things or make any of the austere judgments suggested in
your quotations from these documents. All I have ever
done is:
(a) vote for a poet who is to receive $5000;

My Friendship with Edna Millay 97

(b) vote for a chancellor who is to replace some other chan
cellor whose term of office has expired;

(c) attend a nice little cocktail party for my old friend,
Ridgely Torrence, and hear him read a poem with stir-
prising simplicity and very well.

Now that I have come home I find your letter has al
ready borne fruit; at least the worst features that you ob
ject to have been removed.

The truth is, Edna, that the Academy of American
Poets consists of Mrs. Bullock, whose sincere zeal for poetry
is a lovely and engaging thing. She is anything but the
austere paternalist or disciplinarian that some of those
sentences you objected to suggest. I don't really know how
they got in there. I honestly think her sole motive was to
make sure she was helping poetry and not prose.

By 1950, the Academy of American Poets had functioned
four years without ever a restriction being put upon any of
the poets it endowed, without ever a chancellor doing any
thing but write his name on a ballot sent him by mail with
a return envelope already stamped. In that year the vote
was cast for Edna St. Vincent Millay. Edna, moreover, was
in dire need of money, Eugen having died the previous
August, and her own condition and temperament making
creative work, and above all remunerative work, impos
sible. The Academy held one of its glamorous money-
raising banquets at the Ritz Hotel. The famous British
General Wavell was among the distinguished speakers,
and an immense throng was there to see and hear him. Mrs.
Bullock naturally wanted to announce the award at that
dinner, and I, of course, knowing its value to Edna not
only in money but publicity, was eager to have this

98 GREAT COMPANIONS

happen. To Mrs. Bullock, however, it seemed rash to an
nounce it without an assurance that it would be accepted,
for Edna had never acknowledged the changes she had
made in the by-laws. Discussing the problem with her at
the speaker's table, I offered to stand sponsor for Edna, I
was so confident she would be gracious and sensible about
it. But Mrs. Bullock was not satisfied and I finally under
took to call her up in Austerlitz and make sure. It took me
the better part of an hour to get in touch with her, for her
receiver was down and a neighbor had to drive over and re
quest her to hang it up. And when I reached her she was
adamant. She would have nothing to do with the Academy
of American Poets, no matter the changes they had made at
her bidding.

"It is true, Max, I do need the money desperately, but I
can't take it. I could not be happy if I betrayed my ideals
in this thing. There's no use arguing."

We did argue for another quarter of an hour, but it
came to nothing. To her some abstract principle was still
involved; to me there was no concrete sense left in her
position, I returned to my cold dinner at the speaker's
table with feelings unpleasantly mixed: admiration, on the
one hand, for her unshakable firmness of character; on the
other, an offense to something in the depth of me for which
I can think of no nobler name than common sense. I could
not disagree when Leonora Speyer, who heard me report
her answer to Mrs. Bullock, said: "She's a goose!"

A more deeply self-damaging result of the puritanical
streak in Edna was her disastrously conscientious attempt,
in the ibises of World War II, to write popular propaganda
in the form of poetry. She gave all that she received for this

My Friendship with Edna Millay 99

poetry, and the manuscripts of it, to buy ambulances for
the Red Cross. She was tremendously sincere sincere
enough, had it occurred to her, to go to work In a muni
tions factory, or wrap packages, or knit socks for the sol
diers. That would have been a better gift to the war effort
than bad poetry. But it would not have been the sacrifice of
self that New England's rigid moralism demands. Edna
may have imagined her name to be so renowned that her
poetry, diluted to newspaper copy, would be an important
help in "rousing the country," but I find this hard to be
lieve. Her statement, "I have one thing to give in the serv
ice of my country, my reputation as a poet," strikes me as
one of the most aberrant products of the modern brain-
disease of propaganda. It was righteousness on the ram
page, the sense of duty gone mad. And it ended, naturally,
in a nervous breakdown.

"For five years/' she wrote, explaining her illness to
Edmund Wilson, "I had been writing almost nothing but
propaganda. And I can tell you from my own experience
that there is nothing on this earth which can so much get
on the nerves of a good poet as the writing of bad poetry."

In sending us her beautifully titled book, Make Bright
the Arrows, she wrote on the fly-leaf an inscription that was
painful to read: "To Max and Eliena, who will not like the
many bad lines contained in this book, but who will like
the thing it wants so much to help to do, and who will like
the reaffirmation of my constant affection and love. . . ."
Many American writers most of them have at times
diluted the purity of their art in order to make money;
Edna's sin, we can say at least, was of a noblei>emmg
kind. But it was a sin no less. She acknowledged laler that

100 GREAT COMPANIONS

this debauch of self-sacrifice had been a mistake, and re
gretted it sadly. But then it was too late. She never recap
tured her lost self. She never wrote a great poem after
that. . . .

Now I feel that I have to qualify what I have been say
ing, or define it more carefully. When I spoke of a certain
asperity or did I decide upon the word austerity? in
Edna's assertion of what she believed to be right or true,
I did not mean to disparage her noble conception of the
poet's role. She believed with Shelley that the poet should
take his stand on the side of liberty and justice in the social
and political struggles of his day, and of all days. She was
greatly and courageously earnest in this enough so to
travel to Boston and risk imprisonment and the loss of her
then monumental popularity by marching in the "mob pro
test" against the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti in 1927.
Her presence in that hazardous and disreputable action is
perhaps a better answer than I have made to those extremely
literary critics who dismiss her as a bohemian play-girl and
reduce her role in American literature to "adolescent self-
discovery." None of them, I am sure, can boast of having
shown up at Beacon Hill on that heroic occasion, or ever
demonstrated their boasted "maturity" in an equivalent
fashion. Delicate as her verse was, and lyric rather than dra
matic, Edna Millay stands beside the poets to whom
you raise your eyes after reading their books poets who
were minds and muscles in the world and not mere
versifiers.

Perhaps it was inevitable that a combination of lyric
waywiftiiness with such a moral code should express itself
sometimes in austere or puritanical forms that held me a

My Friendship with Edna Millay 101

little at a distance. Perhaps it was my own softy-ness, my
wish at all costs to have things run smoothly, rather than
any excessive sharpness of edges in Edna, that I was depict
ing with that word austerity. At any rate, it is not her con
secration to the struggle against Nazism that I have been
meaning to criticize, only her terrible mistake worse than
austere, fanatical of sacrificing to it the integrity of her
art.

And I must mournfully add that a good while before
that stern revel in self-mortification, and quite possibly
among the predisposing causes of it, the springs of her
lyrical genius had ceased to flow. Conversation at Mid
night, a book of unkempt and inconsequential prose mixed
with poetry which was published in 1937, marked the end of
her life as a great poet. I do not know all of the causes of
this. She seemed to be mysteriously sick a great deal of the
time, and notwithstanding her moralism she had nothing
of the soldier in her. She cultivated for all it was worth the
privilege of being sick. She lived largely upstairs in her
bedroom, and would fly up there from the slightest annoy
ance a noisy guest, an untimely call from a neighbor or
a passing friend. The last time I stopped by at Steepletop
I had rather angrily to ignore a sign nailed up on a tree
by the gateway: "Visitors received only by appointment.**
Edna was a self-spoiled child. She had, in early girlhood,
when dedicating herself to poetry, decided that she was a
specially delicate-fibered, somewhat supernal being, and
this did not help when she was called upon to triumph over
pain. She babied herself and Eugen babied her; the most
was made of every reason why she should not spend her
energy. Often a good deal of energy is consumed in trying

102 GREAT COMPANIONS

too diligently to conserve it. Valetudinarian would be too
ponderous a term to describe her attitude; one felt on en
tering Steepletop that some very fragile piece of china, in
estimable in value, was in unstable equilibrium upstairs,
and that even the air-waves, if too much agitated, might
unbalance it. Eugen, to be sure, could disturb the air-waves
all he pleased, and being an obstreperous, athletic, noisy-
laughing person, he disturbed them a plenty, but he did
stand guard over his frail treasure, his "child/ 7 as he some
times called her, like a dedicated dragon. No poet ever
lived a more sheltered life. But I doubt very much whether
that state of affairs increased the output of poetry.

There was, at any rate, a cruder cause of the decline not
only in the quantity, alas, but the quality, of Edna's poetry
one which I dread to mention, but since it affected our
friendship as well as her poetry I cannot leave out. She and
Eugen, in the first flush of their love, had gone in too
romantically for rural solitude. The theory was that she
would write poetry and study the stars, while he would run
the farm and the business of promoting and selling her
poetry a thing he did, by the way, with masterly skill and
success. Thus they would be happy with nature and each
other, and the world would not be too much with them.
The metropolitan world, particularly, would not be with
them at all. Many in love have dreamed this dream, and
have realized it for a while. In the long run, however, for
those who grew up on a diet of stimulating diversions, of
social and egotistical fun, of "something to do" in the long
evenings, the reality is very different from the dream. The
romance becomes a discipline. Something has to be done to
keep up the poetry of it. What Eugen and Edna did was to

My Friendship with Edna Millay 105

stimulate their hearts and dull their cerebral cortices with
alcohol. That is an inner short cut to a condition not re
mote from poetic exhaltation, a heightened consciousness
without the drive toward action. It is, as everybody knows,
a great deal of fun, and Eliena and I enjoyed that fun with
Eugen and Edna many times. But knowing the price to be
paid, we were sad to see it settling into a habit indispen
sable to their enjoyment of living.

I once said to Edna: "If I lived the year round at Steeple-
top, I would miss the social stimulation that I need after
my work is done."

"The rising of Cassiopeia/' she exclaimed, "is stimula
tion enough for me!"

Inwardly my answer was: "Edna, darling, you are stim
ulating yourself with your fifth cocktail while you make
that romantic remark. 57 But that is one of the many, many
answers that throughout my life I have refrained from
making.

I did subsequently, however, in a letter on some other
subject, remark to Eugen and Edna that they were drink
ing too much. They acknowledged in a prompt answer that
it was true, thanked me for having the hardihood to say it,
and assured me that they were reorganizing their life-
pattern very soon in such a way as to correct it.

They never did correct it; their life-pattern went from
bad to worse. There is no doubt that chemical stimulation
blunted the edge of Edna's otherwise so carefully cherished
genius. It also caused our four-sided close friendship to
dwindle away, for the old gay conversations came to de
pend upon a preludial pepping-up which required more
alcohol than Eliena and I could, or cared to, as a matter

104 GREAT COMPANIONS

o daily habit, take. Our back-and-forth visits gradually
ceased, and we drifted apart. We drifted so far apart that
in 1949, when Eugen died in Boston under an operation
for ulcer of the stomach, I knew nothing about it for
several months.

I telephoned Edna when I learned of it, and suggested
that Eliena and I come up to Steepletop to see her. She
said:

"Yes, but please don't plan to spend the night, because
I break down sometimes, and I don't want you to see me
when I do."

This left so little room in which to renew our friendship
that I inferred she did not really wish, under the heart
breaking circumstances, to renew it. I might have gone
alone and I sometimes wish I had, but the mood of indul
gence revealed in what she said awakened in me a sense of
the thing I liked least in her character. I did not want to
see her disposition to baby herself declining into self-pity.
I was a coward perhaps or was I wise to preserve a beauti
ful and heroic memory that had already gone far into the
past?

Santayana in a Convent

E,

Jver since my young manhood, when he confirmed me
in my still diffident opinion that Greek wisdom is wiser
than the wisdom of the church, I have felt a kind of com
panionship with George Santayana his close presence, at
least, on the intellectual road I was traveling. I have read
many of his books with studious admiration, and he read at
least six of mine and wrote me thoughtful and inspiriting
letters about them. In one of those letters he dreamed up
an "often remembered" image of me as a boy who pro
duced in his lecture room at Harvard a sonnet on the Stoics
and Spinoza. I was never in his lecture room at Harvard
and never produced a sonnet on the Stoics and Spinoza, but
I did not tell him this, as I should have had there been a

106 GREAT COMPANIONS

two-way tie between us. I was content to be a misty item in
the flux of his experience. Nevertheless companionship, in
tellectual and imaginative companionship, is the only name
for the riches I received from his presence in my span of
history and from his books.

I never met Santayana personally until the eighty-eighth
year of his life when I paid him five or six visits in the
"Convent of the Blue Nuns" up the hill behind the Coli
seum in Rome. The "blue nuns" are a group of pious Irish
girls in pale azure hoods, and the institution they run,
high-walled and imposing, is properly described as Calvary
Hospital. Within its walls the building has the form of a
cross: one wing is the convent where the "Nursing Sisters"
live; the stem of the cross is the actual hospital where they
serve the sick; the other wing is a guest house, or "Ospizio,"
where they offer a haven to the healthy. Although he was
rich enough to buy a chateau, Santayana's home for his last
ten years was a single bedroom in this Ospizio. It had no
private bath. A shirred screen made of pale flowered print
hid his bed and wash-stand. The screen was low enough to
reveal a crucifix hanging above the bed. The rest of his life
equipment was mostly a desk, a chaise-longue, a few chairs,
and a litter of books. Two high windows looked down over
lawns to a street where defending and attacking armies
marched in and out of Rome during the Second World
War. Those armies did not disturb Santayana much. He
read the papers and current magazines and kept youthfully
up to date on what was happening, but he was not overly
concerned.

At the age of twenty-nine he had gone through an in
ward revolution, a retreat into the world of ideas compara-

Santayana in a Convent 107

ble to a religious conversion. "A surrender of all earthly
demands and attachments," he called it. Within a brief
time his father had died, his adored sister, Susana, had mar
ried, he had learned of the death of a boyhood friend whom
he loved as a "younger brother ... a part of myself/' and
he had found himself "harnessed for life like a beast of bur
den." That was his way of saying that he got a job teaching
philosophy at Harvard! These sorrows, combining with a
temperamental distaste for physical existence, caused a
separation of the inner self from the outer which, he says,
"rendered external things comparatively indifferent." They
still were comparatively indifferent when I saw him, al
though not absolutely so.

I do not like to intrude on the private lives of famous
men, and I felt rather out of character as I approached the
big door of the convent. But I had so much in my head
about Santayana that it seemed a pity to miss my one
chance to look into his eyes. If the reader has patience
and if he has not, what is the use bothering about a philoso
pher I will give him a little sketch of what I had in my
head as I approached that door. . . .

I think it was the year after my graduation from college
that I first met him in a book. He was over forty then, and
had stopped writing poetry which nobody read, to set down
a few thoughts about poetry and about religion and love.
His thoughts were crystal clear, and more beautifully writ
ten than any new thing I had seen. But like so many clear
things, they were a little cold. His ideal of love was never to
attain or even touch the beloved; better indeed if the be
loved, like Dante's Beatrice, has died and exists only in
idea. Poetry too, in his book, was not a celebration of life's

108 GREAT COMPANIONS

real and solid values, but a momentary and rather precari
ous "harmony in the soul" attained in defiance of real life,
which is lived in a general scene of "stagnation and con
flict."

As I was then engaged on my own book, Enjoyment of
Poetry, which makes an enthusiasm for real experience pri
mary in the very definition of this art, I did not nestle down
very deep in his Poetry and Religion. But I was taken pris
oner by its beauty of style; I escaped with an effort. Since
then, Santayana has published twenty-nine books and he
has taken a great many people prisoner with his beauty of
style. Some of the books bear such titles as The Realm of
Essence, The Realm of Matter, The Realm of Spirit. Need
less to say, they are highly intellectual books and contain
what may truly be called a system of philosophy. Our
American intelligentsia has been rather overawed by this
philosophy. The number of people, even very learned ones,
who would venture to tell you just what it consists of, is
small indeed. There is universal agreement on one point
only: that it is beautifully written. And since that places
Santayana alone with Plato, Hobbes, Schopenhauer, and a
very few others, a certain amount of awe would seem to be
his due.

Nevertheless it has seemed to me that a little irreverence
would help in understanding Santayana irreverence to
ward philosophy, I mean. I don't think systems of philoso
phy, except as intellectual adventures, sublime works of
art, are worthy of a serious (or humorous) man's obeisance.
Our knowledge of the world is particular and piecemeal
and will continue so forever. Attempts to bind it into a gen
eral whole require loops and dodges in the mind's pro-

Santayana in a Convent 109

cedure that, brought into plain view, can only be described
as foxy. Therefore, I have not entered wholeheartedly into
any of those Realms of Being that Santayana fences off. The
phrase itself is a blandishment; there are no realms, except
as dying echoes of the kingdom of heaven and the kingdoms
of this world. Omitting those echoes, however, I have found
his teaching both simple and sensible. He agrees with
Democritus that the dynamic principle in whatever exists
is matter; but he notes that matter produces spirits and that
spirits have ideals. The way to happiness for each spirit is
to pursue the ideal that is appropriate to its individual na
ture. He stresses the distinction between serene happiness
and a mere succession of pleasures, and builds much moral
wisdom, as did Democritus himself, upon his basis of ma
terialism. To me, as I have said, it helped to crystallize my
own early notion of a system of "Beatitudes" that would
derive from the teachings of Socrates and Plato and Aris
totle. These Greeks did not give enough place to the ideal
of sympathy, but they went at the question of moral ideals
in a simple, downright, this-worldly way that seemed to me
correct. . . .

With this solemn headful of thoughts I passed through
the old vine-covered walls and approached the great dome
of the convent. I supposed that I would have a hard time
getting in. A genius of detached meditation must have to
protect himself against curious intruders. The Blue Nun
surprised me when she said with a casual gesture:

"Down the long corridor, the last door on the right."
The door was open and the great man sitting at his table,
dressed in loose flannel pajamas, bedroom slippers and a
worn brown bathrobe, engaged in translating a poem of

I1O GREAT COMPANIONS

Propertius. He got up with lively courtesy as I entered. I
mentioned my name and reminded him of our correspond
ence.

"You must forgive me," he said, "I have no memory for
recent things, but I'm very glad to see you."

His smile was almost a laugh, and we sat down and
plunged into a conversation that could not have been more
cordial if he had remembered me well. After a time he be
gan to look at me with surprised attention:

"Oh, I do remember who you are! You were on the op
posite side of the barricades from me, but I liked you. Your
colleague, Upton Sinclair, on the other hand, I not only
disagreed with, but I didn't like him!"

It was not entirely flattering, after all the wonderful and
wise and mostly non-political books of mine he had read so
thoughtfully! But it was a good beginning for a conversa
tion for six conversations as it turned out. And I made
them more fruitful by reading in the intervals the two
books of memoirs he had then published, Persons and
Places and The Middle Span.

Our conversation was about poetry and religion at first.
We differed less about poetry than I had thought in the
early days. I was able to remind him of a letter in which
speaking of my book, The Literary Mind he had said, "I
agree with the gist of your definition of poetry ... I agree
also that aesthetic feeling involves the inhibition of action
and transitive intelligence." I had this sentence by heart
because I had waved it in the face of a professor of Aesthet
ics who tried to quote Santayana against my views of poetry
and art. Santayana really makes more of that inhibition of
action than I do, for to him it is a dive off the deep end of

Santayana in a Convent in

existence into the Realm of Essence. I think of it only as a
damming of the stream of experience, a "trance of realiza
tion," almost better anchored than science to the existing
world.

About religion we had more to say because we disagreed.
Although a materialist, Santayana considered himself de
vout and worshipful. He loved the rites and ceremonies of
the Catholic church. He loved its dogmas, knew them to
the last detail, and dwelt on them with unreserved emo
tion. But he did not think they were true. He thought they
expressed in a symbolic way ideals that were needful to
spirits in finding their way through a material world.

"The churchly ideas have no authority," he said. "Lately
I've been making much of that word 'authority.' Only ma
terial facts, at bottom only the facts of physical science,
have authority."

I remarked that it seemed a little old maidish to me to
perform solemn rites and bask in adult emotions concern
ing events you do not think happened and persons you
consider unreal.

"It is like playing at life with paper dolls," I said.

"That's because you were brought up a Protestant," he
answered. "You can't sense the tradition that hallows those
legends and gestures. As a boy in Spain I grew up among
them. The world I grew up in was a Catholic world."

He seemed content to leave me out of that world; there
was no effort to open a door. And I was content to stay out.
I do not think going through the motions of religion with
out genuine belief is a peculiarly Catholic phenomenon
or even a peculiar phenomenon. The peculiar thing about
Santayana was his candid confession, or rather bold celebra-

112 GREAT COMPANIONS

tion, of It. He made a sincerity of being insincere. He was
religious without a religion.

"I wonder how the Blue Nuns like this kind of religious
ness," I said, and he laughed not ironically.

"They pray for me/ 1 he said, enlarging his eyes. "I asked
them only please not to pray that when I die I go to heaven.
Send me rather into limbo where I can enjoy a little con
versation with my friends. That I really think they under
stood."

Santayana had a great deal of fun out of life, in spite of
or was it because of his detachment from it. Sometimes
the high theologians of the Vatican would come in and try
to convert him to a literal belief in these dogmas that he
loved. His friend and amanuensis, Daniel Cory, told me
that once in the heat of a discussion, one of them quoted a
passage from St. Thomas Aquinas. When he had finished,
Santayana said:

"While you are using that argument you might just as
well get it right/* and gave him back his quotation, cor
rected and in Latin!

Santayana emphatically denied that any such thing ever
happened, and I believe him, but it makes a good story and
a significant one. He vastly surprised me with his taste for
fun. Not that his books lack humor of a subtle kind, but he
had written me a letter about my book, Enjoyment of
Laughter, that made me think he cherished a meditative
grouch. I couldn't quote that letter then; I could only re
member how it had surprised me. But I can quote it now,
and it surprises me still more since I have the image of him
laughing. It began with the assertion that he couldn't un
derstand a word of the book!

Santayana in a Convent 113

"I can understand your own words, and no doubt I
should see a part, at least, of your reasons for making the
distinctions you make in the kinds of the comic. My diffi
culty is with the comic universe itself. There is where
everything eludes me in so far as it is supposed to be comic
and in so far as this comic is supposed to be a part of the
good. All these jokes seem rather ghastly. And the enjoy
ment of laughter, rather than a painful twist and a bit of
heartache at having to laugh at all, being your whole sub
ject, I say I don't understand a word of your book. . . ."

Can you wonder that I was surprised to find him pos
sessed of a merry laugh that took charge of his whole face,
and was ready to go into action on the most trivial provoca
tion? I expressed my surprise and he answered:

"Don't you know I'm a follower of Democritus, the
'laughing philosopher'? A good many of my friends think I
laugh too much. They think I'm a little silly. But I think
laughter is very important. It's one of the two things I de
mand of a friend the ability to laugh and the ability to
worship."

I left the subject there, for I did not like to try to remind
him that he had written me letters about my books. But I
must say it puzzled me, and does still.

"I wonder what a materialist can mean by worship/* I
said.

"I mean adoration of the ideal, of something beyond and
apart from yourself."

In that quick easeful way he would answer every ques
tion I asked, I never knew a man whose thoughts flowed
out of him so like a liquid nothing stiff or contained, no
guards put up against inconsistency or misunderstanding.

114 GREAT COMPANIONS

They came out of him that way, and couldn't come any
other. In his books you sometimes feel this as a fault. You
say to yourself: "This man writes too damn well!" But in
conversation it was a delight, and made him winning at the
first encounter, and if you kept on going to see him, lova
ble.

He had one disproportionately long canine tooth that
might have belonged to a devil, and his eyes were a bit de
monic, the irises black as a black beetle, and so placed that,
when he was alert, you could see the whites all the way
round. They were Bob Hope eyes, only serious. But the at
tention they expressed was warm and genuine and you felt
in the end that there was something childlike rather than
satanic in the way they startled you.

If America were more intellectual, George Santayana
would have been regarded throughout my life, I suppose,
as her most distinguished writer. I don't know who could
beat him. But he was a philosopher, and most of his twenty-
eight volumes give the cerebral cortex a workout for which
the average United States reader is ill prepared. One of his
former students at Harvard told me the boys used to wear
heavy overcoats to his lectures, he carried them to such icy
pinnacles of abstract speculation. At the age of seventy-
two, however, he descended from those pinnacles and cap
tured the world with a best-selling novel, The Last Puritan,
a feat theretofore unknown in history. And he subsequently
wrote three small autobiographical volumes as knowingly
delightful in their comments on concrete men and women
as though he had passed all his life in the cozier valleys
where they live.

Notwithstanding these signs of earthy alertness, Santa-

Santayana in a Convent 115

yana was commonly thought of as looming above, rather
than occupying a place in American literature. His Spanish
parentage and citizenship gave force to this notion, al
though he lived from his eighth to his forty-ninth year in
and around Boston and to quote his own surprising asser
tion, "hardly ever read a Spanish Book."

"England is where I feel naturally at home," he told me.
"I should have settled there but for my fear of absorbing
all the British prejudices. Other prejudices are not so
tempting to my nature/'

The fact that he spent his last years within the walls of a
convent reinforced our sense of Santayana's remoteness
from the usual ways and interests of Americans. You would
expect a male recluse to get him to a monastery, instead of
a nunnery, in retiring from the world. But in truth there
was no retiring from the world.

"My retreat has always been moral only, not discipli
nary," he assured me, "and it took place in 1893."

He explained on purely financial grounds his coming to
the Blue Nun's hospice to live.

"The reason was that my money from America was about
to be cut short, and I succeeded in making an arrangement
with the head of this Order to pay in Chicago, where they
have a large hospital, an equivalent of my dues here. This
was arranged; and I was for three years with 30,000 lire
which I happened to have on hand for pocket money. Later
I found that the treasury had stopped my nephew's pay
ments to Chicago, and he and I had much trouble for leave
from the government to pay up what was due, after the
War."

The nuns made him comfortable. Their prayers for his

Il6 GREAT COMPANIONS

soul's future pleased his emotions without unsettling his
opinions. Besides he was getting old. He believed with Epi
curus that luxury is bad for the spirit's health. It seemed as
good a place as any in which to live the last, and he in
sisted, the happiest, years of life, and, when the time came,
to part from it with pleased composure.

Notwithstanding his explanation of its beginnings, there
was conceivably a significance in Santayana's spending so
long a period in the companionable care of the Blue Nuns.
It runs to meet the fact that he played leading lady in the
Harvard theatricals of 1884, and two years later danced as
a ballerina in the Hasty Pudding play. It calls up the fact
that when he was a boy and his brother read Shakespeare
aloud, he liked Julius Caesar, but found Romeo and Ju
liet "inexpressibly silly." It chimes with his earnest, though
not unsmiling, proof that angels although they do not
exist are of the male sex.

Santayana has an eloquent dissertation on love in his
Reason In Society,, but there is not a sign in his memoirs
that he ever experienced this emotion toward a woman. I
doubt if any other memoirist has devoted so much energy
of understanding to his friends as Santayana did. He paints
them with a lingering and loving hand. But they are all,
except only his mother and his adored half-sister, Susana,
men. He remarked to me that all his good friends, with
the single exception of Robert Bridges, the English poet-
laureate, were men younger than himself. They were think
ing men, and the life of the mind is what drew the friends
together, and yet the friendships were highly charged with
emotion. Of a boy, Edward Bayley, with whom for a few
weeks he used to walk home from school, he writes:

Santayana in a Convent 117

"The bond was established, silently of course, but safely.
Even the fact that we never saw each other after that year
and hardly a letter passed between us, made no difference
in our friendship. Strange enchantment! Even today, the
thought of that youthful comradeship, without incidents,
without background, and without a sequel, warms the
cockles of my heart like a glass of old port.

"There is a sort of indifference to time, as there is a sort
of silence, which goes with veritable sympathy. . . . Clear
ness and depth in the heart, as in the intellect, transpose
everything into the eternal. . . . Never was trust more in
stinctive, more complete, or more silent, at least on my side,
for sixty years."

Had Bayley been, by permission of destiny, a girl, or had
Santayana been what at moments he came so near to being
Plato! only one change would have occurred in this
passage. Instead of "sympathy," the key word would have
been, as it should be, love.

I am not trying to psychoanalyze Santayana. I am not
one of those voluble doctors who can tell you all about
the "unconscious" of a famous writer by glancing through
his books, but will charge you fifty dollars an hour five
hours a week for a hundred and fifty weeks to arrive at
some little preliminary inkling about your own. I am only
calling attention to what Santayana deliberately and
frankly said in his memoirs about himself a source of
light on his philosophy that for some reason none of those
puzzled by it has yet thought to exploit.

As a young man, being witty, vivacious, and a born
gentleman, he was quite a success in Boston's intellectual
society especially in the somewhat scandalous circles sur-

Il8 GREAT COMPANIONS

rounding Mrs. Jack Gardner, who shocked the Bostonians
almost to death with her bohemian goings-on, but revived
and silenced them with the gift of a sumptuous museum
of art. Santayana never "took a shine" to any of the lus
cious and bewitching girls he must have met in those gay
circles.

"I never courted any of them," he says in the language
of the i88o's for that is how long ago it was. "I liked to
sit next to them at dinner, when conversation became more
civilized in the midst of light and flowers, good food and
good wines. The charm of the ladies was a part of that
luxurious scene and polite intoxication; for me it was
nothing more. But people could not understand that this
could be all. . . ."

Ostensibly he was explaining, in this passage, that he
did not want to marry an American woman because he
regarded himself as "involuntarily uprooted," and not at
home in our soil. But certainly no one who had felt
amorous toward those women would have explained this
judicial decision in just such terms. When he adds, "My
real affinities were with three or four elderly ladies. ..."
and therewith concludes the whole subject of his relations
with women up to his fiftieth year, there is no need to draw
inferences. He is presumably withholding his most in
timate experiences in this sphere, and there is no sign in
his dissertation on love that he was without such experi
ences. But he is also telling us in plain language that he
was not, even at the height of his young manhood, pos
sessed of any strong interest in women as women. His
half-sister Susana, he had already told us was "the greatest
power, and certainly the strongest affection, in my life."

Santayana in a Convent 119

And so all in all he has pretty plainly stated I am sorry I
lacked the nerve to ask him point-blank that he was
never passionately attracted to a woman. He liked women
to be elderly; he enjoyed them as table companions.

There is a discourse on friendship immediately follow
ing the one on love, which to my thinking points up this
fact.

"Friends," he says, "are generally of the same sex, for
when men and women agree, it is only in their conclusions;
their reasons are always different. So that while intellec
tual harmony between men and women is easily possible,
its delightful and magic quality lies precisely in the fact
that it does not arise from mutual understanding, but is a
conspiracy of alien essences and a kissing, as it were, in
the dark. . . . The human race, in its intellectual life, is
organized like the bees: the masculine soul is a worker,
sexually atrophied, and essentially dedicated to impersonal
and universal arts; the feminine is a queen, infinitely
fertile, omnipresent in its brooding industry, but passive
and abounding in intuitions without method as passions
without justice. Friendship with a woman is therefore apt
to be more or less than friendship: less, because there is
no intellectual parity; more, because (even when the rela
tion remains wholly dispassionate, as in respect to old
ladies) there is something mysterious and oracular about a
woman's mind which inspires a certain instinctive defer
ence and puts it out of the question to judge what she says
by masculine standards. She has a kind of sibylline intui
tion and the right to be Irrationally a propos. There is a
gallantry of the mind which pervades all conversation with
a lady, as there is a natural courtesy toward children and

120 GREAT COMPANIONS

mystics; but such a habit of respectful concession, marking
as it does an intellectual alienation as profound as that
which separates us from the dumb animals, is radically in
compatible with friendship."

For me this only proves that Santayana was never in love
with a woman. In love he would have learned that women
have often much of the masculine in them, just as men
himself notably have much of the feminine. Santayana's
criticisms of other philosophers is masculine in a high de
gree; it is logical, methodical, lucidly annihilating. But
when he comes to bringing forth a philosophy of his own,
the parturition is "mysterious and oracular" to such an
extent that logicians find it almost impossible to follow.
He himself confesses: "Abstraction is difficult for me. Un
less I can move with a certain volume of miscellaneous
notions in my mind, I lose interest and direction. I could
never play chess. . . ." And is there any admirer of San-
tayana's prose who would deny him "the right to be
irrationally a propos?"

One need not be a Freudian to recognize the illumina
tion these facts cast upon Santayana's reasonings about
the universe, I believe that without considering them it is
impossible to appraise his claim to be a moral philosopher
that is, a man wise in the search for life's best values.
They must be supplemented, however, before the picture
is clear, by one or two other things he frankly tells us.

He was born in Spain of parents who did not love each
other enough to stick together. Indeed, his mother, he
says, did not love erotically at all, but "to men as men,
even to her two husbands, seems to have been cold, critical

Santayana in a Convent 121

and sad as if yielding to some inevitable but disappointing
fatality." When little Jorge, a prodigiously sensitive child,
was seven years old, his mother packed up and went to
live in Boston, leaving him alone with a rather preoccupied
father. Whether to make it better or worse, an "Uncle
Santiago" and his kitchen-dwelling wife and daughter
moved in to live with them. Describing this awful moment,
Santayana says: "I didn't feel deeply or understand what
was going on, but somehow the force of it impressed my
young mind and established there a kind of criterion or
standard of reality. . . . That crowded, strained, disunited
and tragic family life remains for me the type of what life
really is: something confused, hideous, and useless."

Most young boys, so wounded in their spirit, would have
found the cure in a subsequent love affair. But for one to
whom Romeo and Juliet was "inexpressibly silly" no such
cure apparently could be had. Santayana's reaction was to
recoil from reality altogether. It seemed thereafter "axio
matic" to him, he says, that "the real was rotten and only
the imaginary at all interesting." It became his firm opin
ion that existence itself is "profoundly ugly and wrong."
And recalling this opinion in old age, he added that, with
a slight allowance for youthful exaggeration, "it is still
what I think."

That there might be something "wrong" with Santayana,
and not only with existence, seems not to have otfcurred to
his'.mind. And yet, I think his further confessions tend
to bear this out. For they are confessions of an almost total
amnesia extending through the years of his growth up to
manhood. He was up-rooted and brought over to Boston

122 GREAT COMPANIONS

to rejoin his mother at the age of eight and a half, and he
described his memory of events and feelings from then up
to the age of sixteen as "for the most part a blank."

"And yet I know that my feelings in those years were
intense, that I was solitary and unhappy and attached only
to a persistent dream-life fed on books of fiction, archi
tecture and religion."

Whatever griefs and dismays lay behind the curtain
which memory, so often merciful, drew over those years,
we may be sure, I think, that existence in general was
not to blame. Existence can be right and beautiful as
well as ugly and wrong, as is quite obvious to common
sense. It is existence as experienced by a man limited in
passion as he was, and injured as he was in childhood, that
Santayana rejects wholesale and despises. For me, after
much reading of him and a half dozen thoughtful conver
sations with him, that seems to be the point at which a
study of his ideas should begin.

With such emotional limitations, and an injured child
hood, a person of medium force would probably have
limped through a rather apologetic life. Santayana stood
up firm and bold, grappled with the universe and bent it
so far as twenty-nine books can do so to his spirit's
needs. That is the story of his life and philosophy as I see
it.

This is hardly the place to discuss Santayana's system of
metaphysics, and yet I think I can make its main point
clear if the reader has a little curiosity. It is a system for
getting free of the world without leaving it. You must, first,
make a sharp distinction between things and the charac
ters they take on. A flower has beauty, for instance, and

Santayana in a Convent 123

it fades. The flower continues to exist, but not its beauti-
fulness. Still the beautifulness can be talked about, rea
soned about, investigated, described. So may all the
characters that things put on or take off and even im
aginary characters may be so dealt with. These characters
Santayana calls "essences." They are infinite in number;
they are changeless; and though they do not exist, they
have a sort of "being," or you couldn't talk about them.
If you call the place, or no-place, where they have this
being a "Realm" allowing yourself that one slight self-
deception you will find it a much richer realm to dwell
in than that in which things have the misfortune to exist.
For the Realm of Essence, you see, contains all the char
acters of existence, and then some. These characters are
independent of time. And best of all, although this ad
vantage is not usually mentioned, there is no compulsion
on you to entertain any particular one of them in prefer
ence to another. You can pick and choose. There is, for
instance, an essence called "sliminess," but nobody who
dwells in the Realm of Essence "dwells in the eternal"
as Santayana likes to say is compelled to bother with it.
Existence, on the other hand, if you get thoroughly wound
up in it, is liable to spring one of these repellent essences
on you when there is no escape. What is worse, she will
put one on right in your presence when you are looking
the other way, or trying perhaps to think about something
sublime. Existence is not only "ugly and wrong," but
"cruel and nasty," as Santayana says in another connec
tion.

Starting with that opinion, or that emotional recoil from
the rough ways of a changing world, Santayana built him-

124 GREAT COMPANIONS

self a refuge in the conceptual apparatus with which
change is described. This is the gist, as I see it, of his
doctrine of essence. It is a brilliant invention, an escape
without exit, an ascension into heaven without departing
from the earth. It has value for those who are too honest to
deny that life is, and must be, lived by the body, and yet
too squeamish to take life on those terms and make the
most of it.

Santayana's religion as well as his philosophy, his hold
ing to the Roman Catholic faith without believing in it, is
to some extent explained, I think, by this recoil from real
ity. He did not learn any religion at all from his parents.
"My mother," he says, "like her father before her, was
a Deist: she was sure there was a God, for who else could
have made the world? But God was too great to take special
thought for man: sacrifice, prayers, churches, and tales of
immortality were invented by rascally priests in order to
dominate the foolish. My father, except for the Deism, was
emphatically of the same opinion. Thus, although I learned
my prayers and catechism by rote, as was then inevitable in
Spain, I knew that my parents regarded all religion as a
work of human imagination; and I agreed and still agree
with them there. But this carried an implication in their
minds against which every instinct in me rebelled, namely
that the works of human imagination are bad. No, I said
to myself, even as a boy: they are good, they alone are
good; and the rest the whole real world is ashes in the
mouth/*

There was surely no such implication as that in his par
ents* opinion. What seemed bad to them was works of
imagination put over on the innocent public as objective

Santayana in a Convent 125

truth. This seemed at times a little bad even to Santayana.
Indeed in one place he says that the attribution o literal
truth to religious mythology makes it "odious." But that
does not enter into his mature opinion. His mature opin
ion is that science itself, even physical science, has no pic
torial or literal truth. It conveys the relations of material
things only by way of symbols. And religion does the same
thing for spiritual relations. It expresses them in "ob
viously mythical and poetical images; but how else should
these moral truths be expressed at all in a traditional or
popular fashion? Religions are the great fairy-tales of the
conscience."

That the symbols of science are exact and verifiable, or
at least strive to be so, and the fairy-tales of religions are
so made that they can be twisted and turned any way the
parson or priest (whether "rascally" or super-benign) may
wish to twist and turn them seemed unessential to San
tayana. It must have been because his real motive was not
to clarify moral relations in a real world, which with all its
faults is to be cherished as the best we have, but to escape
from that world and dwell among unreal symbols. These
symbols were excused for their flimsiness by a possible
meaning, or any number of confused meanings, they might
have in the real world. But they were loved and adored
for their very flimsiness for the fact that they are not,
like existing things, "ugly and wrong."

Such, at least, is the natural conclusion when Santayana's
memoirs and his speculations are brought into the same
field of vision. We see hi both a man lacking the lusty taste
that most living things have, and must have, for the strong
flavors of bodily and real existence.

126 GREAT COMPANIONS

I sent the earlier parts of this essay to Santayana when
they were finished, and I sent them with some trepidation
because I was not sure he had intended the reader to infer
as much about his amatory experience as I had in reading
his memoirs. My inference was most explicit in speaking
of his early feeling for the boy, Edward Bayley, a feeling
which he called "sympathy" although its name was so ob
viously "love." His answer I thought fully confirmed what
I said on that subject:

Dear Mr. Eastman,

Your letter and two articles have naturally interested
me, especially where you catch the spirit in which I write,
which is not always. But in speaking of my school friend
Bayley you are very sympathetic. As to the use of the word
"love," I leave the discussion of it for the time when I shall
have read your views on my "system" of philosophy, when
I shall have radical criticisms to make. . . .

I had promised to write more, but unfortunately had
not done so before September 1952 when Santayana died.
Thus I will never know why he did not use the word love,
nor have the benefit of his criticism of my criticism of his
philosophy.

He did, however, take one random shot at me in closing
his letter, and came so wide of the mark that I wonder
whether a further exchange would have had much value.

"Your trouble with me on major matters," he wrote, "is
that you do not understand that I am a pagan. Perhaps
you don't care for Greek and Roman classics. That seems
to blind you to normality. America is not normal, not
natural, but forced, Protestant."

Santayana In a Convent 127

In view of what Santayana's admiration o the ancient
Greeks had once meant to me, and the intemperance of my
own admiration for them, that remark seemed almost
fatherly in its failure of understanding. In answering him,
I did not try to defend America or Protestantism which
does not interest me much more than Catholicism but I
said in my own behalf:

You are quite wrong in thinking that I don't under
stand you are a pagan. It was as a pagan that you meant so
much to me in my early life. A sentence from one of your
books: "The Greeks were able to think straight about
morals," has come to my mind as often in the forty or so
years since I read it as any other sentence I can remember.
My own feeling is that I am more pagan than you, and
that is why I find it hard to reconcile myself with your
Catholicism. This may be, of course, because I was myself,
in birth and early environment at least, a Protestant. My
paganism bears that flavor as yours does the flavor of
Catholicism.

The big difference was, it seemed to me, that in becom
ing a pagan I had ceased to be a Protestant, while he per
sisted in being, in spite of his unbelief, a Catholic.
Although I recognize the totally new ideal of universal sym
pathy that came with Christianity into the western world,
I do not like churches or church services, no matter what
the sect. Even in the sublime and unsurpassable grandeur
of some of the great cathedrals of Europe, although hum
bled and overwhelmed by man's achievement, I feel myself
a stranger. I am one who wandered in from out of doors.
But in Greek temples in the Parthenon I feel spiritu-

128 GREAT COMPANIONS

ally at home. The Greeks thought straight about morals
because they did not mix morals with other-worldly super
stition. And their temples were akin to the earth and the
sky and the mountains because the air in them was not
heavy with that baleful mixture. Their religion was not
devout; they had no word, I think, for sanctimonious.

Such at least has been my way of idealizing them, and I
was full of such thoughts when, after my last conversation
with Santayana in Rome, I visited the ruins of the ancient
Greek world in Sicily. Syracuse was one of the stateliest
cities in that ancient world, almost as impressive to the eye
as Athens. It stood on a high crown of land jutting into the
sea, and at its topmost point a statue of Athena, the goddess
of wisdom, held up in the sun a spear which provided the
first gleam of home to sailors returning from far countries.
Beside the statue stood a magnificent Doric temple in
which the goddess was worshipped one of the most beau
tiful, perhaps after the Parthenon the most beautiful, of
all the works of Greek architecture. It was never destroyed
but was coated over so to speak, by a Christian cathedral
of mediocre design and messy ornamentation. The vast
columns of the classic temple are still visible or semi-
visible, embedded like fossils in the walls of the medieval
church. To me this was a sacrilege, a crime against beauty
and against the few relics that are left of the "rational ideal
of human life," to quote Santayana, that was aspired to by
the ancient Greeks. And to me it symbolized in a startling
way the thing I had found distasteful and bad in San
tayana himself, an unresolved conflict, or rather a false
reconciliation, between his heroic championship of the life
of reason and his equivocal, half-hearted, and half-minded

Santayana in a Convent 129

allegiance to the dogmas of the Church of Rome. His bold
Greek wisdom, which had seemed to shine so clear upon
my youth, had been, after all, mixed up and coated over
with elaborated relics of that life of superstition from
which the Greeks had so astoundingly liberated their
minds. . . .

When Santayana died, a final volume of his autobiog
raphy was published almost immediately, having been held
up, he told me, for fear of libel suits by a long lost, but
conceivably still surviving, lower-class mistress of Lord
John Russell. In that volume I found, almost like an ar
ranged surprise, his own comment on that temple of
Athena which he too had visited in Syracuse.

The transformation excited my architectural fancy. To
turn a Greek temple into a Christian church all you need
to do is to wall up the peristyle, leaving a window in the
upper part of each space between the columns, and then
pierce arches in the side walls of the cella. Your interior
then occupies the whole or nearly the whole of the temple
platform; place an altar where the statue of the god had
stood, and you have a complete church: even a great
church, if you are prudent enough to retain a narthex be
fore the inner door, and an ambulatory behind the altar.
This was not done as I could wish in Syracuse, but the
great columns were not walled up so as to be wholly con
cealed, and the line of the pediment remained visible, if
not uninterrupted. The transformation had not been the
work of one artist, but of many bishops; yet it allows
enough to subsist of the ancient temple to make evident
the continuity of worship and the identity of civic func
tion in this edifice for three thousand years.

130 GREAT COMPANIONS

Some of my more worshipful readers will perhaps like
Santayana's reaction better than mine to this architectural
and religious hybrid. Even assuming that he was a be
lieving Christian and that by worship he meant com
munion with a living God, I should still think his taste as
barbarous as that of the "many bishops" who produced
such a crossbred monster. But since his religion was void
of belief, and he really stood, as a "pagan" and a "material
ist," for a development of the Greek view of life to its
logical conclusion, I do not see how anyone can be moved
by his stress on "the continuity of worship." It was not
the continuity, but the discontinuity, that he was stressing
when he reminded me that he was a pagan. In his dynamic
beliefs if anything about Santayana may be called dy
namic he was a pagan.

I have the impression, although I can not pretend to
have verified it with prolonged study, that in Santayana's
earlier writings these dynamic beliefs played a stronger
role. In The Life of Reason, as I remember it, morality
was founded and this was a veritable revolution in Amer
ican thinking upon natural impulse. To live reasonably
was to find, each of us, a way of harmonizing our im
pulses. For each of us there was an ideal, and our best
happiness lay in pursuing it; but the ideal had its cause
and only justification in those irrational organic drives
with which nature had endowed us. This gave our minds
a vital function in the battle of existence; it counseled
noble action. But in his later work, The Realms Of Being,
with its root in the doctrine of essence, the mind has little
engineering work to do. It seems merely to play over a
process of material change and evolution, at best only en
abling us to withdraw from and forget it. Critics have

San lay ana in a Convent 131

pointed out this contradiction, and Santayana has replied
that there is only a change of emphasis, that the later doc
trines are all to be found in the earlier books. When I
spoke to him, however, of The Life of Reason., he said in
stantly (and I think I quote verbatim):

"I don't like those books any more. My later books are
better."

He showed me the mountainous manuscript o his po
litical book, then still to be published, Dominations And
Powers. I remarked with envy as I leafed it over that it
must have been fun to sit there with no contemporary
cares, no journalistic intrusions, and write down the con
clusions of a lifetime about politics. But he shook his head,

"It was a great effort to finish it before I die," he said.
And then with a smile: "I don't like to make efforts!"

It is indeed an effort, and by comparison with his
other books not, I think, a very successful one. Though it
contains astute thoughts and speculations, it is, as a whole,
diffuse, pointless, and inconsecutive. So much so that I at
first thought the effort had been merely to tie together
with a string of ideas those loose notes on politics that had
piled up during a lifetime. But when I expressed this
opinion to Santayana's once close friend, Bernard Beren-
son, he corrected me. The book's lack of order and impact,
he asserted, was due to a change of perspective in the midst
of its composition. Santayana had liked the regime of
Mussolini, and his book in its original design took form
from his approval of Italian fascism. But fascism had col
lapsed and Mussolini's corpse had been strung up by the
heels in Milan before the book was done. It then became
a sermon, and a very long one, without a moral. I was
ready to believe this, because in one of our conversations

132

GREAT COMPANIONS

Santayana had praised Mussolini's government quite em
phatically, and yet, I find no mention of Mussolini or
of fascism in his book. It says astute and devastating things
about the communists and kindly understanding things
about the United States, but about this other edifice which
tumbled to ruin within sound of the author's ears, it re
mains strangely silent.

"Mussolini's government was a good one/' Santayana
said to me. And he further spoke with tolerance of the
murderous methods by which it established its tyranny
over the minds and movements of men.

"A few dissenters had to be locked up on an island,"
was his way of dismissing this tale of horrors.

The frailty of his political philosophy is not unlike that
of his metaphysics, with its artifice of the "realms" of
being. He imagines that man's life in society can be di
vided into "spheres" called economic and spiritual, and
authoritarian control conceived as confining itself within
the economic. But every vital activity of man in modern
society has economic aspects and conditions. "Economic
control is not merely control of a sector of human life . . .
it is control of the means to all our ends," as Friedrich
Hayek conclusively remarked. Thus Santayana's Utopia is
not only unattainable on earth, as he, like Plato, frankly
confesses; it lacks solid meaning.

This too and the corresponding affability toward fas
cism I find myself explaining on the ground of his recoil
from reality as a whole. A tolerance of bloody gang-rule,
If it will only leave Spirit alone, is hardly surprising in
a man for whom existence itself is "ugly'* and "rotten."
That opinion of existence survives, at any rate, in a most
candid form in this book, Dominations and Powers. And

Santayana in a Convent 133

there survives also, with pitiful explicitness, the injured
child.

"In human nature," the aged philosopher tells us, "gen
erous impulses form amiable interludes like tearful senti
ments in a ruffian. Dig a little beneath the surface, and you
will find a ferocious, profound, persistent selfishness." "If
the child does not retain deep in his heart, the sense that
his parents are his natural enemies, it is probably because
he has no depth of heart to retain anything in. They are
his natural enemies. ... If occasionally perhaps in the
mother one ray of real sympathy breaks through the
everlasting cloud of anxious fondness and admonishing
supervision, it seems ... as wonderful, as incredible, as
dream-like, as if the winds, or the sea, or the wild animals
had spoken and answered him intelligibly."

A philosopher to whom man's life presents itself in these
baleful colors may say penetrating things about many sub
jects even, when he forgets his obsession, about "the hom
age that life pays [in play and ceremony] to its own grace
fulness and generosity." But he can hardly give us moral
or political guidance. For that he would need a robust
discrimination between what is ugly and rotten and what
is not.

I must add, though, that I never come to a professional
philosopher in search of the wisdom of life. They dwell
too much with Being in the Abstract to be of great help to
us in the concrete personal details of it. Santayana, of
course, was especially unbothered by these mazy details.
Although I visited him five times in two successive years,
and we talked each time for two genial hours, he never
asked me where I came from, or how I happened to be
there, or where I was going. It did not matter. Perhaps I

134 GREAT COMPANIONS

compensated for it by feeling a special kind of affection for
him such an affection as one might have toward a very
young and unsophisticated person: beautiful-mannered
and miraculously endowed and yet naively simple and
trustful. In his attitude to his philosophy, especially, he
reminded me of a child who has built a wonderful castle
out of blocks. He knew where each block belonged, and if
you asked him a question, he would lead you around and
show you just where it was and how perfectly it fitted in.
There was even a block called doubt, but it occupied a
carefully appointed place. About the structure as a whole,
its equilibrium and validity, he had a confidence that some
critics have found unpleasantly dogmatic. I found it en
tirely captivating. Who wouldn't be cocksure when he had
erected such an elaborate edifice and made it stand up!

He built a world of philosophic ideas for the dreamy
and squeamish, for those who recoil from a material world
yet will not deny its authority. He built it in language as
beautiful as any to be found in the history of such build
ings. And he fulfilled the task with absolute self-reliance.
Every line of his books was written with audacity and yet
modesty, a tactful yet unyielding determination to be true
to himself. That quality made this man of limitations
great. And it made of his bedroom in the Eternal City,
where he awaited decay and death serenely and without
illusions, a gay place of pilgrimage. To me the conversa
tions there were far more inspiriting than the long, dull,
unconvincing exercise in wishful thinking with which, ac
cording to Plato, Socrates entertained his friends before
drinking the hemlock.

The Magics in Pablo Casals

i

n 1952 Casals was teaching at a summer music school,
or at least blessing it with his presence, high up in the
Swiss Alps at Zermatt, and I was in Switzerland "roving"
for the Reader's Digest. I went up to Zermatt and camped
in the hotel where the school held its sessions and where
he lived. I had a personal introduction to him and he re
ceived me with warmth, but in answer to a remark about
the beauty of the scene, he told me that the unaccustomed
altitude made him dizzy. He drew his hand over his brow,
and I had the impression that it made him very dizzy.
Instead of bothering him with my talk, I asked permission
to sit among the musicians in his classes.

In ten hours of "personal interview" I could hardly have

136 GREAT COMPANIONS

received a more vivid revelation of the man than I did in
hearing him talk to those pupils or colleagues, some of
them famous, who had come to drink, so to speak, at the
fountain of perfection. He would illustrate what he was
saying about some passage in their work by playing it over
on his own cello. It was as though a father in heaven had
leaned down from the clouds and said: "This is how it
should be done," and no mortal could say a word but only
listen.

He seemed also at times to be saying, "This is how life
should be lived," for his words would apply, consciously
and quite often, to problems remote from the exquisite
playing of the cello. He is by common consent the greatest
cellist that ever lived. Fritz Kreisler went farther and
described him as "the greatest man who ever drew a bow."
But he has this still rarer distinction, that he stands
morally as well as musically on a height to which men all
over the world look up. He is a Catalonian, and like so
many Catalonians, a fierce patriot of liberty. When Fran
co's forces swept into the north of Spain, Casals abandoned
his lovely seaside home outside Barcelona, left a fortune
equal to his fame behind him, and took refuge in the
French-Catalan village of Prades on the north slope of the
Pyrenees. There he lived in the two small second-story
rooms of a gatekeeper's lodge with a view on a barnyard,
vowing never to go home until Spain was free. And there,
in 1950, his admirers organized a "Casals Festival," and
musicians and music lovers from all over the world flocked
to the little village to hear him play, and make music with
him, and dwell for two weeks in his presence. These festi
vals, repeated annually, soon acquired a fame like that of

The Magics in Pablo Casals 137

the Wagner festivals at Bayreuth or the passion play at
Oberammergau. The music was played in the ruins of an
ancient cathedral on the mountainside appropriately, for
there is an element of devoutness, if that means consecra
tion to high ways of life, in everything that Casals does.
People who bought records of the music played at the
second festival in 1951 were surprised to receive as a bonus
a record with a cello solo by Casals on one side, and on the
other pressed into the vynolite in his handwriting these
words: "The core of any great enterprise or activity must
be character and kindness/' A strange thing an incon
gruous thing perhaps. But there is evidently a strong
magic in it, for pilgrims to the Casals festivals come home
in a state of exaltation as though they had climbed the
sacred road to Delphi and met Apollo himself in his temple
on the mysterious mountain.

Casals does not, I must say, look much like Apollo. He is
a dumpy little man, with chubby hands, big round eye
glasses, and a head that is glassy bald. At first glance he
looks more like a peanut vendor than Apollo. Only after
watching him closely not watching, but enjoying him
did I begin to see in his features the union of overpower
ing sensitivity with the strength to handle it tremen
dous strength and determination. That and his spon
taneous modesty, the natural absence of any posture of
priesthood, or even teacherhood, in discussing music and
life with those cello-playing pilgrims, made me understand
the state of rapture in which my musical friends come
home from the festivals.

"You must excuse me," he said to a noted Italian cellist
after a critical comment on his playing, "You must excuse

138 GREAT COMPANIONS

me remember I have lived more than twice as long as you
have/'

"If you were half my age," the young man answered, "I
would be grateful for any word of criticism from you."

"Be impulsive be fanciful," I can hear him saying.
"Let the music flow out of you as freely as though you were
talking. But remember that freedom is not disorder. . . ."
A long thoughtful pause. "That is something that has wide
application in our times." Another pause. "Hold yourself
at the same time within the bonds of the rhythm to the
last fraction of a second. Be spontaneous and yet be con
trolled. That is what you have to learn."

And most often I remember this: "The main thing in
life is not to be afraid to be human. If something is so
beautiful it makes you want to cry, I'll tell you what to
do. . . .Cry!"

It is not to my credit as a journalist, but I was rather
glad to gather my impressions of Pablo Casals in this im
personal way by watching him talk instead of talking to
him. Rich with these impressions, I motored down the Alps
and across southern France and visited his home in Prades
and the old roofless cathedral wiiere the festival concerts
were held. The scene was mystically beautiful; all the
flowers were in bloom; all the birds were singing; the moon
rose boldly in the sunset, getting ready to shine all night.
I was happy in the nearness of a great man, but I had no
story for the Reader's Digest.

I don't know who gave me the address in Perpignan of
Casals* close friend and informal amanuensis, Jose Maria
Corredor, who has since published a book about him. Cor-
redor was already gathering material for that book and was

The Magics in Pablo Casals 139

absorbed in the creation of it. But he stopped his work
when he heard of my need, and shared with me everything
he had, all the tiniest notes and memoranda on his desk,
everything he could remember, as though it were my story
and not his book that he was writing. From him I
borrowed the guiding lines and many of the colors for a
story-portrait that I am going to include in this book, al
though I cannot describe Casals as my friend, much less my
companion.

He was born in the little town of Vendrell in Catalonia,
30 miles from Barcelona. His father was the organist of the
village church, and Pablo sang in the choir. He also made
music, almost from babyhood, on any instrument that
happened to be around the house piano, flute, guitar,
even the violin. His muscular coordinations were as phe
nomenal as his instinct for music. Impressed by them, his
musical father arranged an apprenticeship for him with
the village carpenter. But his mother, though she had small
understanding of music, knew that her son was a genius,
and decided to make it known to the world. Using some
arduously saved pesetas, she took Pablo to Barcelona where
he could study at the municipal school. There he got, or
she got for him, a night job playing the piano at a popular
cafe. In due course he persuaded the proprietor to let him
play a program of classical music one evening a week, and
as he was only twelve years old, and played well, this made
a sensation in musical circles. "El Nen," as they called him
Catalan for nino became quite famous in a local way.
His fame increased when he took up the cello, a "foreign"
instrument, which he will tell you he knew to be his own

140 GREAT COMPANIONS

the moment he drew a bow across Its strings. Thanks to
this knowledge and yet more, he insists, to his mother's
force of character and tact he arrived at seventeen in
Madrid and was invited to play before Maria Cristina,
Queen Mother of Spain. The queen was captivated, not
only by the music he made, but by something shining out
of his eyes for which she could find no more specific name
than "goodness/* She granted him a pension to continue
his studies and practically adopted him into her household,
where he became the playmate of the future king, Alfonso
XIII. In acknowledging a debt of gratitude for this royal
patronage, Casals was always careful, Senor Corredor told
me, to explain that the feeling was "strictly personal." It
did not prevent him from growing up a republican and a
libertarian to his finger tips. And the same thing seems to
have been true of his mother, who, after a two years in
dulgence in this life of luxury and high privilege, an
nounced abruptly one morning:

"It's time for a change!"

Next to Bach's music and the cello, this bold and wise
mother seems to have been the dominant force of attrac
tion in Casals' early life. He loved her, and his admiration
equaled his love. Some of her admonitions to her children
were more like the lectures of Epictetus than the things one
is apt to learn in church. "Never let any external circum
stance alter your purpose or disturb the calmness with
which you pursue it," was an aphorism that Casals re
membered throughout his life.

The particular change she had in mind just now was
that Pablo should, like all aspiring musicians, "study
abroad." The Queen's councillor, Count Morphy, gave

The Magics in Pablo Casals 141

him a letter to the director o the famous conservatory in
Brussels, considered the greatest school in the world for
stringed instruments, and promised him a pension from the
court throughout his course of study. The director, after
reading Count Morphy's letter, sent Pablo immediately to
the cello class of the famous Professor Edouard Jacobs.
Pablo slipped into the classroom and sat down modestly in
a back row. He didn't look like much. Indeed he didn't
look like anything at all, for while all authentic musicians
in those days wore their hair almost to the shoulders, his
was cropped short. When Professor Jacobs asked him what
he would play, he said simply:

"Anything you like."

The professorial eyebrows were raised.

"Well, well, you must be remarkable!"

The class roared with laughter as the professor asked
ironically:

"Can you play the so-and-so, for instance?" naming a
little known and difficult composition.

Casals said, "Yes."

"And the so-and-so, perhaps?" naming one still more
difficult.

Again Casals said, "Yes."

"Very well then, I suggest that you play the Souvenir
de Spa. And now, young gentlemen, prepare yourselves for
a treat from this young man who can play anything we
like!"

Although he had to use a borrowed cello, Casals played
this most obscure and difficult composition without a flaw
and with a brilliance that left the class, and the teacher
also, transfixed.

142 GREAT COMPANIONS

Recovering his breath, Professor Jacobs invited him into
the adjoining room and urged him to join his class,
promising him without further examination the annual
prize for the current year. But Casals had not liked this
priggish reception. It offended his ideal of civilized con
duct of character and kindness. He said he didn't care to
stay.

The decision cost Jacobs a lifetime of regret. And it cost
Casals his pension, for Count Morphy insisted on his
remaining in Brussels, and he very politely explained that
he didn't want to.

He went instead to Paris, he and his mother and now
also his two younger brothers. They arrived there penni
less, ignorant of the language, and without friends or letters
of introduction. His mother at least had her wish for a
change a plunge, indeed, from regal ease to penury. The
father sent them his small savings, the mother took in sew
ing. He boasts that she once sold her hair, which was long
and lustrous, for a few francs to tide them over a crisis. He
himself got an ill-paid job as second cellist in the Marigny
Follies. But he had to walk back and forth twice a day from
a tiny flat in the outskirts to the center of the city once
for his lessons, once to earn the money to pay for them
carrying a cello on his back. "We learned by direct experi
ence what misery is/* he would say in recalling those days.
But the lesson was too costly. He fell sick, and they had to
abandon the glamorous idea of an education abroad and
go back to Barcelona.

There the good luck returned. Pablo's old music teacher
was just moving to Argentina, and Pablo, at eighteen, fell
heir to his teaching and his services in a church. It was not

The Magics in Pablo Casals 143

long before he was reconciled with the queen, and played
again in Madrid. At twenty-one he was famous throughout
Spain and Portugal. At twenty-three he returned with his
mother and two brothers to Paris. He had saved enough for
all three to live on now, and he had a letter from Count
Morphy to the famous French conductor, Charles La-
moureux, who was preparing a series of winter concerts.
The famous man grumbled when Casals presented the
letter he didn't like to be disturbed when at work. Casals
offered to withdraw, but Lamoureux took a look into the
eyes of his visitor, and grumbled again:

"No, go ahead and play, young man I like you."

Casals tuned his instrument with special deliberation,
remembering his mother's counsel of purpose and calm
ness. Finally he began to play, and with the first few notes
Lamoureux turned in his chair. He had a physical infirm
ity which made it an effort for him to rise, but when Casals
finished, the great conductor was standing before him.

"You shall play in my first concert!" he said.

Casals' debut in Paris with the Lamoureux orchestra
was an event in the cultural life of the French capital. But
it was in Vienna that he won his place in the history of
music. Vienna was then the center of the musical world
and he was so nervous when he came before the audience
that his hand was tense when he lifted the bow. To limber
it, he tried to do a little twirl he had learned when playing
drum major as a child. The bow flew out of his fingers
and landed in the middle of the orchestra. While it was
being solemnly passed back from row to row, he had time
to summon once more into memory that maxim: "Never
let any circumstance . . /* His hand was steady when the

144 GREAT COMPANIONS

bow reached him, and he played with a mastery never
before equaled by him or by any other cellist.

There is a selflessness, a lack of vanity, in Casals' devo
tion to music that has hardly a precedent. He would rather
conduct an orchestra than win glory as a virtuoso. As a con
ductor, moreover, he enjoys the rehearsals more than the
final show. It is "making music" that he loves, and he loves
to teach people how to do it. As a child in the choir at
Vendrell he never could restrain himself from telling the
tenors and sopranos what to do with their voices. And
while he was growing to world fame as a cellist, he used his
earnings to the amount of six hundred thousand dollars to
create and train a "people's orchestra" the first in the
world at Barcelona.

To make its music available to all the people, he formed
a Workers* Concert Society with dues of one dollar a
year, and gave concerts for its members at reduced prices.
Casals also satisfied his love for simple people, his wish not
to let fame and fortune divide him from them, by going
back to Vendrell for two or three weeks every year to live
again with his old friends, the carpenter, the blacksmith,
the shoe store keeper. On these visits his special joy was to
get together with the local musicians and give a popular
concert in the public square.

Once, when climbing Mount Tamalpais after a concert
in San Francisco, Casals barely saved his life by jumping
aside from a rolling boulder. It struck the first finger of his
left hand, apparently smashing it for good. To the astonish
ment of his companions, his first words were: "Thank God,
I shall never have to play the cello again!"

The Magics in Pablo Casals 145

What he meant was: "I can devote my whole life to
making the greatest of all music!" For to him the greatest
music is a social achievement it is the music of a well-
trained orchestra, disciplined in mutual good will and the
purpose of perfection. "Honesty to the limit'* is another
ideal he holds before an orchestra, and he means it both
of social conduct and of music. His musicians feel toxvard
him the veneration that churchmen feel toward a loved
priest or pastor. Years ago when he was only growing into
manhood they said of him in Barcelona: "He turns a caf
into a concert hall, and a concert hall into a temple."

Today all Catalonians, and to some degree all freedom-
loving Spaniards, feel the same way toward Pablo Casals.
He has become the symbol of their hope of liberation from
a dictator. In the successive disasters that have befallen
European democracy in his lifetime, he has taken his stand
stubbornly and reckless of the cost to himself, on the side
of freedom and the rights of the individual man. His
popularity in the old Russia and his income from concerts
there were enormous, but when after the October revolu
tion of 1917 the Bolsheviks established the Cheka and
began executing dissenters, he declined all invitations to
tour that country.

"My only weapon is my cello," he says. "Not a very
deadly one perhaps, but such as it is, it fights on the side of
freedom."

When Hitler attained to power and began persecuting
Jews and labor unions, he declared the same boycott
against Germany. When Mussolini took over Hitler's
policy of anti-Semitism, he extended his cello's protest to

146 GREAT COMPANIONS

Italy. His action when Franco seized power in Spain was
but the continuation of a policy of protest against tyranny,
international in its scope.

His life as an exile in Prades was more like that of a
Franciscan monk than a world-famous musician. Every
body in the village felt free to drop in on him for advice
or help, or just to give him the news of a birth in the family
or the high marks a small boy had made in school. As it
was with Buddha, peasants from miles around flocked in
to converse with him, bringing bouquets of flowers. Who
ever came was greeted with a smile and a "Please sit
down!" There was no theory of democracy about this;
Casals loves people and they make him happy.

One afternoon, long after he had become world famous,
he was visited in Paris by a friend and fellow-student from
the provinces. They chatted together for several hours, but
at five o'clock a pupil who had been practicing in a neigh
boring room came in, exclaiming at the lateness of the
hour: "But sir, you have a concert at eight and you have
not had your nap/'

The visitor, in great embarrassment, apologized pro
fusely. "You have a concert, and here I've done nothing
all afternoon but talk about myself and my little prob
lems/*

Casals saw him quietly to the door, took a leisurely
farewell of him, and said: "You have done me a great
favor. Before you came I was nervous and worried about
my performance this evening. Now I am happy because I
know that all goes well with you and your family."

Midst of his many visitors, Casals finds time to answer in
longhand all the letters he receives to answer them and

The Magics in Pablo Casals 147

file them away in folders he makes out of the sheets of old
newspapers. Senor Corredor told me that after one of the
Prades festivals he answered six hundred letters in his own
hand. Moreover, he has kept every letter that was ever
written to him. Some visitor would drop in and mention
"that letter my father wrote you a couple of years ago."
Casals would get up from his chair, go to his filing system,
and be back in a very brief time with the letter in his hand.
He made almost a life mission of helping the Spanish refu
gees, giving them both intimate counsel and material aid.

There must be a limit to this system of loving kindness.
But up to the date of my story, Casals had managed to live
in the modern world, with all its frenzied multiplication
and speed-up of the forms of social communion, almost the
life of an early Christian believer a life dedicated to the
love of the neighbor.

To balance this statement, I must add and I learned
this from a discerning pupil in Zermatt that, although
ready to give himself so lavishly to those who need him,
Casals is not gullible. He is not an "easy mark.' 1 He is not
blinded by good will. He has, on the contrary, an almost
uncanny way of knowing exactly what everybody in a
roomful of people is up to. "Nobody ever fools him/* his
pupil said. He takes only a few friends deep into his heart.
They are the ones he calls "good." Goodness includes op
position to violence, tyranny and totalitarianism in all its
forms.

But it also includes self-discipline. Like all Catalans
and most musicians, Casals is loaded like a bomb with ex
plosive emotions, but he never blows up. He never behaves
like a prima donna. He behaves "like a Greek philosopher"

148 GREAT COMPANIONS

until he draws a bow across the strings. Then those pent-
up emotions have their day. The ease and spontaneous
freedom of his movements seems miraculous, as though
some supernal power had taken possession of him, but life-
long possession of himself is the real secret of it. He has
pondered every note of every composition he plays. He
studied the Bach suite for cello, which no cellist before
him had tackled, for twelve years before he ventured to
play it in public. He is still studying it. He thinks of him
self in the presence of all great music as a student. He will
announce with delight that he has found a new way of
fingering some passage that he has been playing for fifty
years.

When a pupil complained to him that she had forgotten
a piece she had known well and played many times, he
said: "That's fine! Everything should be new every time
you play it."

As remarkable as the high firm way in which Casals em
ploys his powers, is their survival in him at so advanced
an age. He was an old man when I saw him in 1952. His
seventy-seven years seemed a load to lift when you saw him
get up or sit down. But when he took that cello into his
hands, the weight of those years dropped mysteriously
away. A being inside of this aging body was still young
and in total command. "Why he's playing it better than he
used to!" was the astonished remark of a famous musician
who attended a festival rather to honor Casals than to
hear him.

And to this judgment practically everybody in the mu
sical world agreed at that time. Few living in other worlds
can realize how much it meant. If a gymnast at seventy-

The Magics in Pablo Casals 149

five were to run down a spring-ramp and turn a double
somersault over the backs of four elephants, that would
be world news. But the coordination and control of nerve
and muscle, the sheer flexibility and power, would hardly
be more remarkable than that of Pablo Casals at the same
age.

My story ends here. I only know, as everybody does, that
Casals moved in 1956 to Puerto Rico and married a young
lovely girl. The festival followed him there, and has been
held three times in the milder climate of that southern
island. This year, however, his admirers persuaded him,
after it had been held there, to return to Prades and let
them gather again in the old surroundings. And after that,
notwithstanding the altitude and his eighty-one years,
Casals attended again the Cours Musicaux de Zermatt, and
continued explaining to his young colleagues and disciples
how the cello is played and life lived if you want to do
it well.

Problems of Friendship with Trotsky

A,

Jthough Trotsky's eyes were a rather pale blue, re
porters were always calling them black. Not only Frank
Harris, with his genius for remembering what didn't
quite happen, but John Reed, a keen and careful observer,
made this mistake.

"To look at he is slight, of middle height, always strid
ing somewhere. Above his high forehead is a shock of wavy
black hair, his eyes behind thick glasses are dark and al
most violent, and his mouth wears a perpetual sardonic
expression. . . ."

So Reed described him in a dispatch from revolutionary
Petrogradin 1918.

152 GREAT COMPANIONS

"There's something fatal about it," Trotsky commented.
"Those black eyes figure in every description of me, al
though the eyes nature gave me are blue."

I, for my part, can testify that in Prinkipo in 1932,
nothing less dark or violent was to be seen on the horizon
than Trotsky's pale blue eyes. His mouth, in repose, might
be described as cherubic. He could be sardonic; he could
cause an oratorical opponent to shrivel in the air with a
single shaft of sarcastic logic. This seemed a black art, and
its Mephistophelian character was emphasized by that
wavy black hair and a short, pointed beard. It was, how
ever, a trait of mind and social attitude, not a physical
trait.

I came rather close to Trotsky during the year and nine
months that I spent in Russia in 1922 to 1924, for he
agreed to tell me his life story and let me make a book of
it. We never finished the book, but I published half of it
with the title, Leon Trotsky, The Portrait of a Youth.
Nine years later Eliena and I spent twelve days with
him and his wife and retinue of bodyguards and secre
taries on Prinkipo Island in the Sea of Marmona where
he found refuge after Stalin had driven him from Russia.
It was there that he and I got really acquainted. It was not
on my side a pleasant process or rather it was pleasant
while superficial, but harshly unpleasant as the acquaint
ance deepened. This was no great surprise to me, for al
though I took Trotsky's side in the conflict with Stalin,
and fail to see how any understanding revolutionist could
Iiave chosen otherwise, I was far from enamored of him
jperaoaally. I hero-worshipped him and do still, especially
after reading Isaac Deutscher's glowing account of his

Problems of Friendship with Trotsky 153

revolutionary deeds,* but I did not, even in Moscow while
writing my own little book about his youth, feel any affec
tion for him, I used to say this frequently when coining
home to Eliena after an hour's conversation with him at
the War Office, but I could not explain why. He was not
egotistical; he was forever wandering from the main sub
ject to expatiate with thoughtful penetration about the
lives and qualities of his friends. Yet to me he was not a
friend. With all those intimate talks about his infancy and
youth about all infancy and youth, all growing into life
and grasping it we never came together. Therefore it was
not with happy excitement, but with an under feeling of
reluctance, that I accepted in 1932 his urgent invitation to
"come and spend several weeks with us in Prinkipo and
well work and go fishing together."

Although it happened twenty-five years ago, my impres
sions of Trotsky at that time are entirely fresh for I wrote
them down then and saved them. I wrote them at two
separate times: one in the evening after the first three days
of our visit, the other on the train to Jerusalem the mom-
ing we left. I present them here as they were written in
1932.

I. After Three Days

Trotsky seems the most modest and self-forgetful of all the
famous men I have known. He never boasts; he never
speaks of himself or his achievements; he never monopo-

* I refer to the first volume of his biography, The Prophet Armed; the
second is not yet published.

154 GREAT COMPANIONS

lizes the conversation. He gives his attention freely and
wholly to anything that happens or comes up. With all the
weight of worldwide slander and misrepresentation he
struggles under today, the peculiar position he occupies,
he has not so far breathed a syllable suggestive of preoccu
pation with himself or even the ordinary, quite human
touchiness that one might expect. As we work on his book,
if I pay him a compliment, he says some little thing, "I am
glad," and then passes hastily to another subject. After all,
I agree with his colleague, Lunacharsky, although I did
not when I came here, that there is "not a drop of vanity
in him/'

Like many great men I have met he does not seem al
together robust. There is apt to be a frailty associated with
great intellect. At any rate, Trotsky, especially in our
heated arguments concerning the "dialectic," in which he
becomes excited and wrathful to the point of losing his
breath, seems to me at times almost weak. He seems too
small for the struggle. He cannot laugh at my attacks on his
philosophy, or be curious about them as I imagine Lenin
would because in that field he is not secure. He is not
strongly based. I get the impression of a man in unstable
equilibrium because of the mountain of ability and under
standing that he has to carry. In what is he unequal to the
load? In self-confidence? Is it the Jew's inferiority complex
after all? Is it that he has never played, never loafed and
invited his soul, or observed that the sunshine is good
whatever happens? When I remarked that fishing with a
dragnet is interesting work, but not sport, he said:

"Two plusses it is interesting and it is work! What
more can you ask?"

Problems of Friendship with Trotsky 155

I wonder if that is the mood in which he will go fishing
intense, speedy, systematic, organized for success, much
as he went to Kazan to defeat the White Armies.

He seems to me over-sure of everything he believes. I
suppose that is what Lenin meant in his testament when
he warned the party against Trotsky's "excessive self-con
fidence." But I suspect that his weaker point as a political
leader would be that when that cocksureness breaks down,
he is non-plussed. He does not know how to cherish a
doubt, how to speculate. Between us, at least, to confer is
out of the question.

His magnanimity, his freedom from anything like ran
cour, is amazing. I see it in his portrayal of his enemies,
but also in smaller things. Yesterday we reached a point
of tension in our argument about dialectic that was ex
treme. Trotsky's throat was throbbing and his face was red;
he was in a rage. His wife was worried, evidently, and
when we left the tea table and went into his study still
fighting, she came in after us and stood there above and
beside me like a statue, silent and austere. I understood
what she meant and said, after a long, hot speech from
him:

"Well, let's lay aside this subject and go to work on
the book."

"As much as you like!" he jerked out, and snapped up
the manuscript.

I began reading the translation and he following me, as
usual, in the Russian text. I had not read three senteiiees
when he suddenly, to my complete surprise, dropped the
manuscript and, looking up like a child proposing a new
game, said:

1^6 GREAT COMPANIONS

"I have an idea. What do you say you and I together
write a drama of the American Civil War!"

"Fine!" I said, trying to catch my breath.

<4 We would each bring something to it that the other
lacks. You have a literary gift that I lack, and I could sup
ply a factual knowledge of what a civil war is like!"

This man has the childlike charm of an artist. Perhaps
my feeling of his weakness, of his being inadequate to his
load, derives from the fact that his character as a man of ac
tion is the result of self-discipline and not of instinct. He
has made out of himself something more, or at least other,
than he is. I do not know. I merely record these two, or
rather, three impressions: an utter absence of egotism, in
stinctive magnanimity, and something like weakness, as of
a man overburdened with his own great strength.

IL Ten Days Later

It is fortunate that I recorded the above impressions im
mediately, for now, after twelve days in Trotsky's home,
my mood has changed to such an extent that I could hardly
write them down. I feel "injured" by his total inward in
difference to my opinions, my interests, my existence as an
individual. There has been no meeting either of our minds
or feelings. He has never asked me a question. He has an
swered all my questions, as a book would answer them,
witibont interchange, without assuming the possibility of
mutual growth. My pointed criticisms of his policy that
he has not thought out the implications of the problem of
nationalities on a world scale, that he never should have let

Problems of Friendship with Trotsky 157

Stalin make "socialism in one country" the issue, thus
jockeying him into the defense of a negative slogan were
met with mere lordly-hasty rejection. I was an amateurish
creature needing to be informed of the technical truth
which dwelt in his mind.

On the disputed question of Trotsky's "vanity," I still
agree with Lunacharsky. His failing is subtler than that
and more disastrous. He lives instinctively in a world in
which other persons (except in the mass, or as classes) do
not count. In youth he stood prodigiously high above his
companions in brain, speech, and capacity for action, so
that he never formed the habit of inquiring he was always
telling. His knowledge and true knowledge, his view and
the right view, were identical. There is no bragging or van
ity in this, no preoccupation with himself. Trotsky is pre
occupied with ideas and the world, but they are his ideas
and his view of the world. People, therefore, who do not
adulate, go away from Trotsky feeling belittled. Either
that, or they go away indignant, as I am.

Opinionated minds are usually far from wise; Trotsky is
opinionated in the highest degree, but with wise opinions.
Cranky people are usually old and barren of fruit. Trotsky
is cranky, but young and fruitful.

I want to dwell on the manner in which his arrogance
differs from vanity, or self-centered egotism. It is not a con
scious thought, but an unconscious assumption that he
knows, and that other people are to be judged and in
structed. It is a postulate laid down in his childhood, as I
said, and by his instincts. That, I now suspect, is why he is
weak and indecisive and lacks judgment when frustrated.
That is why he became almost hysterical when I parried

158 GREAT COMPANIONS

with ease the crude cliches he employed to defend the no
tion of dialectic evolution. The idea of meeting my mind,
of "talking it over" as with an equal, could not occur to him.
He was lost. Similarly in the party crisis when the flood of
slander overflowed him, he was lost. He never made one
move after Stalin attacked him that was not, from the
standpoint of diplomatic tactics, a blunder. Trotsky is much
concerned with the task life imposes of making decisions.
He told me once that in youth he passed through a period
when he thought he was mentally sick, because he could
never make up his mind about anything, but that as Com
mander of the Red Army he often astonished himself by
the prompt assurance with which he gave orders to generals
and colonels trained for a lifetime in military science.

It was in revolt against an inferior father's stubborn will
that Trotsky developed the "excessive self-confidence" that
Lenin warned against. What he needed, when that self-con
fidence cracked, was a father an authority to defer to.
That is what Lenin supplied. If you read Trotsky's History
of the Russian Revolution carefully as carefully as I, the
translator, did you will find that, although he praises
others, he never attributes fundamental importance, either
of initiative or judgment, to any Bolshevik but Lenin and
himself. (That comes near, I must say, to being the objec
tive truth about the October revolution, yet I think a dili
gent search might have discovered exceptions.)

Trotsky's idea of our collaborating on a play was, he con
fessed later, a scheme for making money. He is spending
$1000 a month, according to his wife his secretary tells
me it is nearer $1500 keeping up the establishment he has
founded here and in Berlin. There is, here in Prinkipo, be-

Problems of Friendship with Trotsky 159

sides the secretary and stenographers, a bodyguard of three
proletarians, one continually on sentry duty at the door;
there is another secretary in Berlin, an ingenious system for
transporting books from the library there and getting them
back on time. Besides that, Trotsky is supporting a sick
daughter and her child in Prague. He does not live In
luxury; there is practically no furniture in his villa; it is a
barrack; and the food is simple to an extreme. He merely
keeps up the habits of a War Minister after he has become
the leader of a tiny proletarian party. His secretary, Jan
Frankel, a Czechoslovak, confided to me his anxiety ap
proaching despair because Trotsky, still living like a com
missar, ignored completely the problem of financing his
new party and his own gigantic labors. This was not a
newly developed trait in Trotsky; he was always, even in
his poverty-stricken days, incapable of hanging onto his
earnings. Even the small change in his pocket would drib
ble away, thanks usually to some transparent form of
chantage, in the course of a short walk down the street.
In his present situation, however, it is a calamity, for it
makes him overestimate the revolutionary integrity of cer
tain dubious characters who chip in generously to the ever
dwindling treasury of his "Fourth International." * Money,
of course, is beneath the contempt of a revolutionary ideal
ist gold, according to Lenin, was to be used for public
urinals in the socialist society but while we are on the
way there it deserves a little steady attention.

The lack of comf on or beauty in Trotsky's house, the ab
sence of any least attempt to cultivate the an of life in its

* Mark AManov thinks it was by this route that Stalin's assassin crept into
Trotsky's confidence- a speculation that does not seem to me improbable.

l6o GREAT COMPANIONS

perceptual aspect, seems almost despicable to me. A man
and woman must be almost dead aesthetically to live in
that bare barrack, which a very few dollars would convert
into a charming home. The center of both floors of the
house is a vast hall not a hall exactly, but a room twenty
feet long and fifteen feet wide with great double doors
opening on a balcony which looks outward to the richly
deep blue sea and downward to this bright red-cliffed
island that crouches in the sea like a prehistoric animal
drinking. In these vast rooms and on these balconies there
is not an article of furniture not even a chair! They are
mere gangways, and the doors to the rooms on each side are
closed. In each of these rooms someone has an office table
or a bed, or both, and a chair to go with it. One of them,
downstairs, very small and square and white-walled, with
barely space for table and chairs is the dining room. The
garden surrounding the villa is abandoned to weeds and
these are running to seed. "To save money," Natalia Ivan-
ovna explains. Through sheer indifference to beauty, I
should say. Trotsky talks a good deal about art in his books
and lays claim to a cultivated taste, but he shows no more
interest in art than in that garden. I brought home one day
from Istanbul photographs of the rarely beautiful sarcoph
agus of King Tobuit of Sidon that is in the Museum of
Antiquities.

"Do you want to see one of the most beautiful works of
sculpture in the world?" I said to Trotsky.

He grasped them hastily and handed them back to me al
most with the same gesture. "Where were they found?"

**They were dug up in the ruins of Sidon."

"Who dug them up Schlieinann?"

Problems of Friendship with Trotsky 161

I said, "No . . ." but by that time he was out of the door
and on his way down to dinner.

His sole reaction had been, it seemed to me, to avail him
self of the chance to reveal his acquaintance with the name
of Schliemann. He had, at least, no interest whatever in the
sculpture.

Although it is not so in his books, he seems in personal
life to lack altogether the gift of appreciation. I think it is
because no one ever feels appreciated by him that he fails
so flatly as a political leader. He could no more build a
party than a hen could build a house. With all his charm
ing courtesy and fulfillment of every rule of good manners,
including a sometimes quite surprising attentiveness to
one's comfort, his social gift, his gift of friendship, is ac
tually about on the level of a barnyard fowl. His followers,
the followers of the great brain the greatest political in
telligence, I think, that we have today make pilgrimages
to him, and they come away, not warmed and kindled, but
chilled and inhibited. Those of them, that is, who have in
dividual will and judgment of their own. Hence he has no
influence, properly so called- He does not sway strong
people, but merely directs the weak.

Trotsky is playful and proud of being so, but I notice
that his humor consists almost exclusively of banter. A per
petual poking of fun at the peculiarities of others, their na
tionality, their profession, their circumstances or tenden
cies good-natured, smiling and charming, to be sure, but
not varied with an occasional smile at himself, or any
genial recognition of the funny plight of mankind in gen
eral. And when you take part in the game, when you poke
fun at him, he does not laugh, and his smile is never so

l62 GREAT COMPANIONS

cordial as when he, himself, lands a blow. I feel it is a little
mean and picayune to make this hypercritical observation
of Trotsky at play, for he can be delightful indeed, if you
are firm enough on your own feet to accept his banter and
give it back; but as a student of laughter and of Trotsky
I can't refrain. To me it is all the more significant since
it is a superficial trait.

As to his angularity, his cocksure terseness, that quality
which led Lunacharsky to describe him as "prickly/* I
could not honestly be silent. It is a failure of instinctive
regard for the pride of others, a lamentable trait in one
whose own pride is so touchy. But he also disregards, when
his own schemes are involved, the personal interests of
others. And he is not forthright about it; he is devious even
with his friends. As Trotsky's gift for alienating people has
a certain historic importance, I am going to set down here
the otherwise rather inconsequential details of an episode
which alienated me.

I functioned for some time as a sort of unofficial literary
agent for Trotsky in the United States. I got my pay in roy
alties in the end; I am not pretending to have been extrava
gantly generous; but I did, when he first arrived in exile,
do quite a mountain of unpaid work for him. In the fall of
1931, however, he sent me an article to translate and sell
for him, offering me twenty percent of what I got for it. He
said he hoped for a large sum, as much, perhaps, as two
hundred dollars. I translated it and took it to George Bye,
a popular literary agent, who sold it to Liberty magazine
for $1500. Of this George took ten percent for the sale and
I, ten percent for the translation. This seemed not quite
fair, and Geoige, who was very generous, agreed in the case

Problems of Friendship with Trotsky 163

o future articles to let me have fifteen percent for the
translation and take only five percent for the sale. This ar
rangement was reported to Trotsky; we sold two or three
more of his articles, and he was delighted.

All went well until an article about Stalin arrived while
I was absent on a lecture trip and the translation was de
layed a few weeks. During those weeks Trotsky, impelled
by his book publishers to give an interview to the press,
gave out the substance of the article. After that it could not
be sold at a high price, but George persuaded the New
York Times syndicate to pay a hundred dollars for it and
give it the wide publicity that Trotsky, whatever the
money payment, so much desired.

The delay, and the small fee, and his own costly mistake
in giving out the interview, irritated Trotsky beyond meas
ure. He decided to throw me over and deal directly with
George Bye, trusting him to find a translator. I suspected
this, because a long letter from George was lying on his
desk the day I arrived in Prinkipo. I said nothing about it,
but I noticed the next morning that the letter was gone. As
he had never heard of George Bye, or had anything to do
with him, except through me, this piqued my curiosity, and
at the risk of impoliteness, I decided I would force him to
be frank. To my seemingly casual question about the letter
I had seen, he answered nervously: "Oh yes, when you told
me you were going to Palestine and might not come to see
me until afterward, I thought it might be best to get in
touch with the agent directly."

I said: "It is all right for you to deal with George Bye
directly, if you want to, but please remember that I have a
contract with him giving me five percent of his commission,

164 GREAT COMPANIONS

and if you deal directly with him without mentioning this,
it will deprive me of a part of my earnings."

He was not impelled either by friendship, or by a recog
nition of my unpaid services to make any response to this.
He was angry about that Stalin article. I was by this time
heartily pleased with the prospect of not being interrupted
every week or so with a too-long article to translate, but I
ventured to remind him that George Bye did not have a
Russian translator at his elbow. He merely said very
sharply:

"No, it is absolutely impossible when you are traveling
around Europe. The fate of that Stalin article showed me
how impossible it is. I prefer to deal directly with a re
sponsible agent."

My breath was taken away by the harsh, irascible tone in
which he said this. If I had been at home when the Stalin
article came, and had translated and sold it immediately
say to Liberty for a high price, it would have been in
print and ready to publish when he gave away the sub
stance of it to the press. The result would have been an ex
plosion in the editorial rooms and a refusal to have any
thing to do with "Trotsky articles" in the future. I tried to
say this, but he cut me off again sharply.

"No! Such delays are impossible. It is quite impossible to
have the translator in one place and the agent in another."

In short, I was fired and being in my heart glad of it, I
took it in silence, and we changed the subject.

We both loved languages, and one of our pleasantest di
versions was for him to dictate to me, in his horrendous
English, answers to his American and British correspond
ents, which I would take home and bring back the next day

Problems of Friendship with Trotsky 165

polished off and typed on my portable machine* That same
afternoon he drew out an illiterate inquiry from some
woman in Ohio about her relatives in Russia, asking me if I
knew who she was. When I answered, no, he said, "I guess
there's no use answering." I agreed and crumpled the let
ter, or started to crumple and throw it in the wastebasket,
but he stopped me with an outcry as though I were step
ping on a baby's face.

"Is that the way you treat your correspondence? What
kind of a man are you? That letter must be filed!"

I straightened the letter out, laughing at my mistake and
passed it over to him, remarking, however, that it didn't
seem to me very important to file a letter that wasn't worth
answering.

There followed a certain amount of playful banter on
that subject, and we went on with our fun, entirely friendly
and good-natured.

The next day, however, I got to worrying, as everybody
in the household did, about Trotsky's money problems. (In
that respect, at least, he was a faithful follower of Karl
Marx.) Realizing that if he sent articles to George Bye to
be translated by anybody with a Russian accent who hap
pened along, he would spoil his last chance of getting the
needed $1500 monthly out of the American press, I ven
tured to raise again that question on which he had been so
crisp. (Trotsky was a hero, you must remember, and more
over, he had been through such nerve-shattering experi
ences at the hands of the implacable avenger of excellence,
Stalin, that no one could hold a grudge against him.)

"I feel a little embarrassed to resist you in this matter/*
I said, "because my own financial interests seem to be in-

1 66 GREAT COMPANIONS

volved, but I can't help warning you that if you leave to a
commercial agent the choice of a translator, you can easily
lose in a month the position you've gained as a writer avail
able to the American press. Of course, you can get state
ments on questions of the day published because you are
Leon Trotsky, but that is a different thing from being a
highly paid contributor to American magazines."

That was, at least, what I set out to say, but he inter
rupted me halfway through with an exclamation impa
tiently snapped out:

"No, no! I prefer not to send my articles to a man who
grabs up his correspondence and throws it in the waste-
basket!"

He imitated my gesture of the day before, but now with
out the slightest playfulness. He was still angry, I suppose,
about the low price he got for that Stalin article. You
would have to have in your memory, as I had, the pains
taking drudgery of my two years* effort to protect his fi
nancial interests and teach him to get what was coming to
him from the American press, to appreciate my indigna
tion. Had he been anybody but Leon Trotsky, I would
have given a red-hot expression to it and walked out.

Instead, I sat still until there came a brilliant inspiration.
It was one of the few times in my life when I thought of the
right thing to say.

"Lyef Davidovich, I can only answer you in the words of
Lenin." And I quoted, in perfect Russian, from the famous
testament: "Comrade Trotsky is apt to be too much carried
away by the administrative aspect of things."

At this Trotsky relaxed and dropped back into his

Problems of Friendship with Trotsky 167

chair, laughing genially and completely, as though to say,
"Touched"

In a moment, however, he was forward and at it again,
insisting now that I had been negligent about other articles
"the one on Hitler, for example." This was an article
that, after several high-paying magazines refused it, George
had finally sold to the Forum for three hundred dollars.
There was nothing else to do with it and nobody was to
blame.

At that point I gave up. Repeating once, and more in
sistently, my warning that a single article published promi
nently in a bad translation might ruin his chances, I added
that I would let him know as soon as I was settled some
where, and he might send me his articles or not, as he
pleased. What he will do I have no idea, but that he will do
anything out of consideration for my interests, or my legiti
mate stake in the enterprise, I regard as ausgeschlossen.

By "gave up," I mean that I abandoned the attempt at
friendly conversation with Trotsky. I abandoned it about
practical, as I had previously about theoretical, questions.
I got away as quickly as I politely could, pleading the need
to get back to the West in time to correct the proofs of the
second volume of his history. To the end Trotsky kept in
sisting that we stay for several months at least, so that he
and I might continue to "work together and go fishing."
He was, so far as I could judge, blandly oblivious to the un-
warmth and unfruitf ulness of our relation.

The problem of Trotsky's character weaves so intricately
in with the story both of the success and the failure of the
Bolshevik revolution that it will never lose interest for his-

l68 GREAT COMPANIONS

torians. I hope a little light is cast on it by this memo
randum, so immediately set down, of my visit to him after
the story ended.

On my way home from Prinkipo, I met in Paris one of
Trotsky's greatest admirers and closest friends the closest,
I think, after Christian Rakovsky and we spoke of the
subtle contradictions in Trotsky's character. To my hesi
tant and groping effort to say that he seemed to me to lack
a feeling for others as individuals, his friend said shortly:

"C'est tout-a fait vrai. II n f a pas d'humanite. Elle lui
manque absolument"

Notwithstanding this startlingly extreme confirmation
of my impression, I feel that I left out of my memorandum
something which, in justice to Trotsky, ought to have been
included; a confession, namely, of my own failure of regard
for the interests indeed the most vital passions of an
other. It was far from tactful of me to descend upon this
intellectually lonely exile with a headful of fresh hot ar
guments against the religious belief by which he had
guided his life to triumph and to this tragic end. It must
have put him on edge against me. Perhaps that underlay
some of the responses which I attributed to more trivial
causes and to the general traits of his character. I find in
our subsequent correspondence a letter in which, as though
to heal an unmentioned wound, he took pains to mention
that he had sent a certain manuscript direct to George Bye
only because he had been given to understand that I was
away from home.

I think Trotsky earnestly wanted to be regardful of the
interests of others, but except in small matters and in the

Problems of Friendship with Trotsky 169

case of his wife, toward whom the most exquisite considera
tion seemed to be instinctive, he did not know how to do
it. He lacked the gift of mutuality. He could apprehend,
and discuss at times with keen penetration, the currents of
emotion prevailing in other people, but he could not flow
with them in a warm common stream.

Differing with Sigmund Freud

i

was living in Europe in the mid-twenties and had pub
lished in London a book on Marxism which contained a
chapter entitled, "Marx and Freud," To my delight and
excitement, Freud wrote me a letter about my book, call
ing it, generously, "wirklich bcdeutsam^ wahrscheinlich
auch richtig"* and then adding as though not to be too
generous "I enjoyed it far more than former works of
yours."

In thanking him, I said: "I'm sure you won't mind my
quoting from your letter in advertising the American edi
tion," and he wrote back, very stiff and caustic:

"I will thank you for not mentioning any of the remarks

* **ReaIiy important, probably abo right.**

172 GREAT COMPANIONS

in my letter in public. I seem thus far to have failed to ac
custom myself to the American life forms."

I replied that I had not mentioned his remarks in public,
but only asked permission to do so. And I think I inti
mated, as mildly as possible, that the American life forms
are such as to make the difference between these two things
usually quite readily perceptible. It may well be, however,
that I merely wish I had said this, for my dominant feeling
was one of mortification rather than resentment. Freud was
not only in many things my teacher, but by proxy at least,
my Father Confessor. More than one of his American apos
tles had given me psychoanalytic advice in time of trouble.
I was not in a position, except so far as honest pride de
manded it, to sass him back.

It all sharpened in me a long-cherished desire to set eyes
on the great man. I knew I had a certain claim to his atten
tion, for as a result of one of my sessions with his American
apostle, Dr. Smith Ely Jelliffe, I had studied Freud's works
very thoroughly and published, in Everybody's Magazine
in 1915, the first popular exposition of his theories and
methods of healing. Thus, happening to be in Vienna in
1926, 1 sent a note around and asked if I might call.

Bergasse 19 was a big roomy house full of books and pic
tures, the whole mezzanine floor padded with those thick
rich rugs in which your feet sink like a camel's in the sand.
I was not surprised to see hanging beside Rembrandt's
Anatomy Lesson, without which no doctor's office would be
recognizable, a picture of The Nightmare a horrid mon
ster with a semi-evil laugh or leer, squatting upon a sleep
ing maiden's naked breast. Freud's early specialty had been

Differing with Sigmund Freud 173

anatomy, and he had in him the hard scientific curiosity
suggested by Rembrandt's picture. But then he had too, in
my belief, a streak of something closely akin to medieval
superstition. He liked to talk about "the Unconscious/*
personifying the mere absence o a quality and that, the
quality of awareness! and making it into a scheming de
mon for which anatomy certainly finds no place. Freud's
discovery that impulses suppressed out of our thoughts can
continue to control those thoughts, both waking and sleep
ing, and also our actions and bodily conditions, was cer
tainly a major event in the history of science. But what a
lot of purely literary mythology he built around it! Mental
healing always did and always will run off into magic.

With such thoughts I sat there whetting my curiosity un
til the door opened and he came in.

Well he was smaller than I thought, and slender-
limbed, and more feminine. I have mentioned niy surprise
at the f eminineness of all the great men I have met. Genius
is a nervous phenomenon and, except for the steam-roller
variety that has come to the front in the totalitarian states,
it involves delicacy. An operation had altered Freud's fea
tures a trifle when I met him, so that his nose seemed flatter
than I expected and bent slightly to one side. It made him,
when he threw his head clear back and laughed softly, as
he frequently did, seem quaint and gnomelike. His voice
was a little thin too, as though he were purposely holding
back half his breath in order to be mischievous.

"What did you want? 7 * he said in English as we shook
hands.

"Not a thing," I said. "I just wanted to look you over."

174 GREAT COMPANIONS

"You want to quote my commendation of your book.
But why should I support you? Can't you stand up on your
own legs?"

"I'm trying to," I said. "And that isn't what brought me
here at all. Still, I do wonder why, if you think I got it right
about you and Marx, you want to make a secret of it."

He made no answer and was not troubled by the silence
this caused. It was a hard silence, a sort of weapon in his
hand, and I made it worse by saying:

"There is one thing I always wanted to ask you. I don't
see why you talk about unconsciousness as though it were
a thing. The only thing there, when we are unconscious, is
our brain and body. Wouldn't it clarify matters if you
stopped using the noun and stuck to the adjective instead
of saying 'the Unconscious/ say 'unconscious brain states'?"

"Well, haven't you read our literature?" he said tartly.
**The Unconscious is not a thing, but a concept. It is a con
cept that we find indispensable in the clinic."

"It is a dangerous concept," I said, "because people in
evitably think of it as a thing."

"Well, then, let them correct their thinking!"

It wasn't very pleasant, and I tried to say with a smile:
"You're perfectly sure you're not resurrecting the soul?"

"No, there's no soul," he said. "There's only a concept
which those of us engaged in practical work find indispen
sable.

"Perhaps you're a behaviorist," he went on. "According
to your John B. Watson, even consciousness doesn't exist.
But that's just silly. That's nonsense. Consciousness exists
quite obviously and everywhere except in America."

He enjoyed that crack at America so much that he began

Differing with Sigmund Freud 175

to laugh and be genial. In fact, he began to lecture me in a
fatherly way about the relations between the psychic and
the physical. He talked fluently, and I am a good listener,
and we were soon very friendly.

"You mustn't confuse the psychic with the conscious," he
said. "My old psychology teacher here in Vienna, Theo
dore Lipps, used to warn us against that. Psychic entities
are not necessarily conscious/'

My answer, of course, was: "Then the unconscious is not
merely a concept after all, but a thing, an 'entity/ just as I
thought!"

However, I did not make this answer until I got home
and was putting down our conversation in a notebook. 1
was too far on the underside of my inferiority complex to
catch a great man up like that. Perhaps it is just as well, for
the contradiction, left standing, is very neat and pretty. It
shows Freud in the very act of being both a scientist and a
deinonologist. Freud would not let his discoveries be a
contribution to psychology. They had to be psychology
"Freud's psychology." And there had to be quite a little of
the infallibility of the Pope in his pronunciamentos.

He had now become so genial, however, that he even
said a good word for America namely, that she had pro
duced John Dewey.

"John Dewey is one of the few men in the world/* he
said, "for whom I have a high regard."

I said that I had taught and studied under Dewey at
Columbia, and thought very highly of him too, though the
World War had divided us. "The war was a watershed in
America.."

That remark interested him, and he kept returning to it

176 GREAT COMPANIONS

afterward. Indeed, he had a way of calling the conversation
back to where it had been going, not letting it get lost, that
reminded me of Plato's Socrates.

For instance, I said that the war was a watershed in
America, dividing radicals from liberals, but not in Europe
because in Europe everybody was in it whether he wanted
to be or not.

"Officially," he put in with a sly inflection. And then he
exclaimed: "You should not have gone into the war at all.
Your Woodrow Wilson was the silliest fool of the century,
if not of all centuries/*

He paused for my answer, which got stuck accidentally
in my throat.

"And he was also probably one of the biggest criminals
unconsciously, I am quite sure."

I said that Woodrow Wilson *s literary style was a perfect
instrument of self-deception, and that delighted him. He
asked me if I had read The Story of a Style, a psycho
analytic character reading of Wilson on the basis o the
relative predominance of certain types of words in his
speeches. I said I had, and we agreed in praising the in
genuity of its author, William Bayard Hale. We were a
long way from my remark about the watershed, but Freud
called me back to it.

"I would like you to say some more about that watershed
business," he said.

"Well, take Dewey, for instance. He went over on the
war side, and wrote a book against Germany, and it seemed
for a time to change his whole way of thinking. Most of our
intellectual leaders who did that stopped thinking al
together."

Differing with Sigmund Freud 177

"Why?" Freud asked.

"You know why people stop thinking/' I said. "It's be
cause their thoughts would lead them where they don't
want to go."

That amused him again, and the whole of his gentleness
came back, including the delighted little crinkles at the
corners of his eyes. He put his head way back finally and
laughed like a child. Sometimes a child at play reminds you
of an odd little old man; there was something of that odd
little old man in Freud's ways. He waggled his head and
hands about all the time, looking up at the ceiling and
closing his eyes, or making funny little pouts and wry faces,
when he was trying to think of a word or an idea. I never
ceased feeling that underneath it all was an obdurate hard
cranky streak, but I also never ceased feeling its great

charm.

He was curious about the support I gave to the Russian

Bolsheviks.

"You believe in liberty," he said, "and there you get just
the opposite."

I gave him our glib explanation: the class dictatorship is
transitional a method of moving toward a more real and
universal liberty.

He made gestures like a man fighting with cobwebs or
doing the Australian crawl.

"That is all up in the air," he said. "People who are go
ing to produce liberty some time in the future are just the
same for me as people who are going to have it ready for
you in the celestial paradise. I live in this real world right
here. This is the only world I am interested in."

I told him the very thing I admired about Lenin was his,

178 GREAT COMPANIONS

way of taking the real world exactly as it is, and yet trying
to do something with it.

"The Bolsheviks," I said, "have a hypothesis and they're
trying it out."

That appealed to the scientist in him, and he became
both serious and mild.

"It is an intensely interesting experiment," he said.
"Really, it's all terra incognita to me. I don't know any
thing about it."

"What are you politically?" I asked.
"Politically I am just nothing."
He settled down in his chair and squinted at me.
"What are you going to do when you get back to that
America of yours?" he asked

"What makes you hate America so?" I queried.
"Hate America?" he said. "I don't hate America, I regret
it!"

He threw back his head again and laughed hilariously.
"I regret that Columbus ever discovered it!"
I laughed with him, and rather egged him on, no doubt,
for I am not touchy about our national faults.

"America," he went on, "is a bad experiment conducted
by Providence. At least, I think it must have been Provi
dence. I at least should hate to be held responsible for it."
More laughter, and then I asked: "In what way bad?"
"Oh, the prudery, the hypocrisy, the national lack of in
dependence! There is no independent thinking in Amer
ica, is there?"

I said there was a new and lively spirit among young
people.

Differing with Sigmund Freud 179

"Mostly among Jews, isn't it?"

"The Jews are not so free from prudery and hypocrisy/*
I replied.

He seemed to change the subject,

"You didn't answer my question; what are you going to
do when you get home? Have you any definite plans?"

"None except that I am going to write."

"I'll tell you what I want you to do. I want you to go
home and write a book on America, and I'll tell you what
to call it. Misgeburt What is that word in English?"

"Abortion?"

"No, not abortion."

"Monster?"

"Well, that will do. You write a book about the mon
strous thing that America turned out to be. . . ." He
paused. "The word is 'miscarriage.* The Miscarriage of
American Civilization that shall be the title of your
book. You will find out the causes and tell the truth about
the whole awful catastrophe."

He was standing up now.

"That book will make you immortal. You may not be
able to live in America any more, but you could go and
live very happily somewhere else!"

I had risen too, and he extended his hand.

"Now I want to see that next book of yours without fail.
So please remember to send it to me, and I'll read it with
happy memories of this conversation. . . ."

A very gracious dismissal! How suave and charming on
the face of it

As I went down the steps, my thoughts recurred to his

GREAT COMPANIONS

similarly gracious letter about my book: "Really impor
tant; probably also correct. ... I enjoyed it far more than
former works of yours!"

Are those I thought the European life forms? Is
Freud a little vain and cranky with too much peering into
other people's complexes? Is it perhaps our rather hard-
headed skepticism about some of the more mythological of
his reported discoveries in "the Unconscious" that caused
this extreme feeling? His American friend and translator,
Dr. A. A. Brill, told me that this feeling dated back to his
visit to this country in 1909 and the meager recognition he
received from scientific circles then. It seemed a strange
thing for an admiring disciple of Freud to say so casually
and calmly. For was it not to deliver mankind from just
that kind of displaced emotion that this hero of self-knowl
edge was born into the world?

That visit in Vienna was but an incident in a one-way
companionship which had begun with a deep plunge into
Freud's books in 1914 and has never ended. When my ac
count of it first appeared, I received a letter from Freud's
sister, Anna Bernays, saying very politely that although
I had met her brother, it was evident I did not know him.
On the other hand, two distinguished psychoanalysts, one a
former close colleague of the master, congratulated me on
the justness of the impression I had gathered so quickly.
The contrast intrigued me, and when another close col
league, Dr. Ernest Jones, began to publish his intimate
biography, I seized eagerly the opportunity to know Freud
a little better. I wanted especially to continue our argu
ment about the concept of the Unconscious.

Differing with Sigrnund Freud 181

So far as concerns Freud's charm and the "obdurate hard
cranky streak" I felt underlying it, Dr. Jones bore me out,
I thought, completely. Freud's confession, quoted by Dr.
Jones on page 8 of the first volume, sounded "cranky"
enough in all conscience: "An intimate friend and a hated
enemy have always been indispensable to my emotional
life; I have always been able to create them anew, and not
infrequently . . . friend and enemy have coincided in the
same person. , . ." As for Freud's passion against America,
that proved only more obdurate on better acquaintance,
and more morbidly bitter, than I had realized in our con
versation. To the end of his days according to Dr. Jones
or at least until it moved down and became recognized as
mucous colitis he used to describe his intestinal disorder
as "my American indigestion." His nephew, Edward L.
Bernays, who is also the nephew of Freud's wife, gave me
an explanation of this anti-American fixation which differs
somewhat from that of Dr Brill. He said that William
James attended those pioneer lectures at Clark University
in 1909, and being intrigued both by Freud and his ideas,
invited him up to his summer camp in the Adirondacks.
To entertain the distinguished guest, they all went out in
the woods and cooked a beefsteak dinner, picnic fashion,
over an open fire. That dinner was the awful beginning o
Freud's indigestion, according to Bernays, and of his anti-
Americanism.

"Why they're still savages over there," he grumbled,
"they cook their food on heated stones out in the woods!"

As to Freud's equivocation about the concept of "the
Unconscious," which I thought revealed so neatly the
conflict in him between the scientist and the mythmaker:

l82 GREAT COMPANIONS

that too received illumination as I got better acquainted
with him. Dr. Jones himself is somewhat perturbed by
criticisms like mine, and he answers them by saying that if
the critics would read all of Freud's writings on the Un
conscious, they would find their objections refuted. So I
went out and bought Freud's Collected Papers and read all
that he had to say on the Unconscious, as well as many fas
cinating things about related subjects. To my surprise I
found, in his principal essay on the Unconscious, the very
same unmediated leap from an ah ob conception to an ex
istent entity that had turned up in our conversation.

I also found out, in those Collected Papers, that while in
sisting that a mental element when absent from conscious
ness does exist as a psychic entity, Freud confessed that he
had not the slightest idea what sort of an entity it was. To
put it in his own language: "In what shape it may have
existed, while present in the mind and latent in conscious
ness, we have no means of guessing." What does he gain
then, as a scientist, by denying the quite obvious assump
tion that it exists "as a physical disposition for the recur
rence of the same psychical phenomenon*? Freud himself
asks the question, and his answer is that this denies to psy
chology "the right to account for its most common facts,
such as memory, by its own means." But again, what does
he gain, as a scientist, by erecting a barrier between psy
chology and the physiology of the brain? It is not impor
tant to psychology, or any other science, that its facts be
explained "by its own means," but by the means which
best explain them. Freud's insistence that there is causal
determinism in the psychical as well as the physical world
by which he can only mean independently of the physi-

Differing with Sigmund Freud 185

cal world is adapted to make untrained minds think they
are being very scientific, but it is a roadblock on the path
of biological psychology.

These papers left me convinced that it is not the scientist
in Freud but an artist a demonological poet who insists
on peopling an underworld with masked demons who
move about in the unlocal dark, controlling our thoughts
and the action of our bodies; the id, the ego, the superego,
the censor, the death-wish, the castration complex, the
Oedipus complex, etc. We "have no means of guessing"
what those creatures are, but they are endowed both with
ideas and intentions, and behave at times almost exactly
like little ghouls or demons. They resist, elude, deceive,
suppress, kowtow to, or overcome one another in a region
which has no existence anywhere on the real earth, and can
have none, for the very name of it, "unconscious mental
action/* is a contradiction in terms. Brain action can be
unconscious, and largely is, but to be mind and to be un
conscious is, if words are to have genuine meaning, a con
tradiction in terms.

Although in that esoteric paper Freud says we cannot
guess "in what shape" the psychic contents o the Uncon
scious exist, it can hardly be doubted that what most
Freudians think of when they speak of "the Unconscious,"
is another conscious mind lurking beneath, or behind, or
somewhere in the vicinity of, the one they are familiar
with. Freud himself compared a wishful idea in the Un
conscious to "a demon striving not to come to the light of
day, because he knows that will be his end/' And indeed it
is hard to make real to oneself, except in such terms, the
existence of a "wish" splurging around, bodiless, unlocal-

184 GREAT COMPANIONS

ized, inside of something, but that something defined only
by a negative attribute. Certain things may no doubt be
accomplished with these demonological concepts, if they
are regarded as merely handy ways of talking. How far
Freud was from so regarding them is revealed in his article
on psychoanalysis in the Encyclopedia Britannica, where
he remarks that "the future will probably attribute far
greater importance to psychoanalysis as the science of the
Unconscious than as a therapeutic procedure/'

I think the future will take exactly the opposite course,
if it is not already doing so. Notwithstanding his vital and
tremendous contributions to psychology, we shall go very
wrong if we take Freud for the "true man of science" of
Dr. Jones' adoring portrait. Science, to be sure, is no super
nal enterprise; it is nothing but the skilled, persistent, and
appropriate use of the mind, and the stores of human
knowledge, about any problem. It does, however, require
at least three qualifications in the scientist: the discipline
of suspended judgment, a mastery of the knowledge rele
vant to his problem, a sustained passion for verification,
Freud had none of these qualifications. He jumped to con
clusions with the agility of a trained athlete. He was (to
quote Dr. Jones) "ill-informed in the field of contemporary
psychology and seems to have derived only from hearsay
any knowledge he may have had of it" he did not even
sense, for instance, the elementary distinction between idea
and perception. He had a temperamental distaste for ex
periment, and no impulse at all toward verification. The
idea of submitting his "insights," his "intuitions," his "ex
plorations of the unconscious," to confirmation by some
one else seems to have been particularly alien to his

Differing with Sigmund Freud 185

intensely emotional and recklessly inventive mind. His atti
tude toward other people's findings may be inferred from
the ferocious demand he made of his sweetheart that she
join him in hating her brother. He would break off his en
gagement, he threatened, if this happy consensus of opin
ion was not attained.

To me he was less like Newton, or Darwin, or any of the
great men of science, than like Paracelsus a man who
made significant contributions to science, but was by na
ture given to infatuation with magical ideas and causes.
Freud's contributions were, to be sure, immeasurably
greater than those of Paracelsus, but there is a similar ad
mixture of midnight fabrication in them. Way back in the
eighties when he was still working in brain anatomy, Freud
got seized with the notion that cocaine, then newly dis
covered, was a "magic substance" the phrase is Dr. Jones*
which would not only cure all sorts of ills, including
morphine addiction, but would increase a healthy man's
nervous and muscular strength without any bad effects,
and without habit formation. He reached this conclusion
"experientally" again a word from Dr. Jones that is,
on the basis of his own experience. While enamored of this
substance, and convinced it would make him world famous
and solve his dire financial troubles, he hit upon the idea
that, besides all these interior miracles, cocaine might pos
sibly be useful in eye troubles as a local anesthetic. He
made this remark to a colleague, but did not himself bother
being all wrapped up in the internal miracles he was go
ing to accomplish to make the tiny experiment indicated.
The colleague made the experiment and became world
famous, while Freud, clinging to his unverified belief in

l86 GREAT COMPANIONS

the life-enhancing properties of his wonder-drug, damaged
his reputation by killing a patient with an overdose of it.

This inclination to believe in occult hunches instead of
trying out plausible hypotheses, is illustrated time and
again in Dr. Jones' account of Freud's development.
Throughout the ten years when he made his "Great Dis
coveries," Freud was in an almost pathological rapture of
admiration for a quack philosopher in Berlin, a thorough
going phoney, who believed in numerology, and professed
to have found the solution of all life's problems in the ratio
between the numbers 28 and 23, which he derived in dif
ferent ways from the periodicity in the sexual life of
women. By manipulating these numbers, this Dr. Fliess
professed to explain the inner nature of almost everything,
not omitting the solar system and the interstellar spaces.
From the age of thirty-nine until he was fifty years old,
Freud accepted and believed in this man's shamanistic lu
cubrations, describing them as "your beautiful and sure
biological discoveries," and Fliess himself as "the Keppler
of biology."

Dr. Jones quite frankly describes Freud's condition dur
ing these years of the Great Discoveries as a psychoneurosis
which is all right, most of us have a touch of that but
that Freud's psychoneurosis expressed itself in an avid dis
position to swallow grandiose and uninvestigated occult
beliefs^ is a point whose significance escapes him.

Dr. Jones is contemptuous of Joseph Breuer, Freud's
collaborator in the early Studies in Hysteria., for having got
off the Freudian bandwagon as soon thereafter as possible.
I do not know whether Breuer ever said what he thought
of Freud, but what Freud said about Breuer pretty well

Differing with Sigmund Freud 187

tells the story: ". . . he always knows of three candidates
for one truth and abominates every generalization as a
piece of arrogance."

The principal "one truth" that Freud was believing in
at the time when Breuer got off was that all hysterias are
caused by the sexual seduction of an innocent child by an
adult. Freud even deduced the criminality of his own
father from this obviously improbable generalization. After
clinging to it for over four years, he did begin to feel some
doubts, but one little piece of "experiental" evidence re
assured him. I quote Dr. Jones:

When, finally, he had a dream about his American
niece, Hella, which he had to interpret as covering a sex
ual wish towards his eldest daughter, he felt he had per
sonal firsthand evidence of the correctness of his theory.

If this is "science," where shall we turn for organized
common sense!

Another generalization to which Freud leaped from a
single experience was that he had been all wrong about
hysterical disorders they are not caused by sexual assaults
in childhood; those are only imagined by the hysteric. The
real, but still universal, cause is the "Oedipus Complex"
in the child. The "experiental" evidence in this case was
an item in Freud's psychoanalysis of himself. Again I quote
Dr. Jones:

He had discovered in himself the passion for his mother
and Jealousy of his father; he fe It sure that this was a gen
eral human characteristic and that from it one could
understand the powerful effect of the Oedipus legend. Evi-

l88 GREAT COMPANIONS

dently his mind was now working at full speed, and we
may even speak of swift intuitions.

We may indeed, and I inserted the italics because I think
it is well to remember how much empirical basis there
was for Freud's original sureness about the universality
of the Oedipus Complex, one of his most fixed and cher
ished obsessions. "In closing this study I want to state that
the beginnings of religion, ethics, society and art meet in
the Oedipus Complex." Thus, in Totem and Taboo, he
sweeps pretty nearly every human thing there is into the
lap of this generalization about which he had so suddenly
felt sure.

Another example of Freud's easy grace in jumping to
conclusions is provided by Dr. Jones in these words:

One day a patient suddenly threw her arms around his
neck, an unexpected contretemps, fortunately remedied by
the entrance of a servant. From then on he understood
that the peculiar relationship so effective therapeutically
[the "transference"] had an erotic basis.

When Freud first came out with his proclamation that
sex traumas lie at the bottom of all neurotic disorders, it
was generally inferred that his own sexual constitution
must be a little abnormal, and I think this inference was
correct. The abnormality, however, was not in the direc
tion of lechery and loose living, but just the contrary.
Freud was a prude and a puritan, a fanatical monogamist,
not sexy by nature, and so "chaste" in speech and conduct
that he "would have been out of place in the usual club

Differing with Sigmund Freud 189

room," He was, in short, the kind of man to be shocked
into a new theory of therapeutics by a girl who jumps up
unexpectedly and throws her arms around his neck. I sur
mise that it was this state of shock, the astonishment of a
natural-born puritan at finding out how much frank and
raw sexuality there is in the world, which led Freud to
"proclaim" again a word from Dr. Jones that extreme
and improbable "One Truth" about the sexual seduction
of young children which brought him so much obloquy
and pain.

When he got hold of a simple but significant fact, he
would feel and know [sic] that it was an example of some
thing general and universal and the idea of collecting
statistics on the matter was quite alien to him . . . that is
the way the mind of a genius works.

So speaks his worshipful disciple, and we can only say:
Yes, but a genius for what? Not scientific investigation cer
tainly. And not literature, either, although Freud was a
gifted writer. Freud himself in a humble moment invented
a name for his genius which, had Dr. Jones accepted it,
would have made his praise of Freud much wiser than it
was:

"I am not really a man of science, not an observer, not
an experimenter, and not a thinker. I am nothing but by
temperament a conquistador an adventurer, if you want
to translate the word with the curiosity, the boldness and
the tenacity that belongs to that type of being."

It was a conquistador, truly, rather than a man of

100 GREAT COMPANIONS

science, who explored this darkest Africa of the Uncon
scious,* a conquistador and a poet. For the progress of
scientific good sense, it seems to me as important to exor
cise the faceless demons with which he peopled this un
imaginable region, as to recognize his epoch-making con
tributions to science. But I hope it will not be imagined
that a closer acquaintance has diminished my sense of the
grandeur of those contributions. Freud played the major
part in making psychology dynamic, bringing the wish into
it, the instinctive drive, in place of the old unlifelike tale
of stimulus and reaction, association and dissociation. And
his discovery that these drives, when denied fulfillment and
repressed out of consciousness, may take effect in hysterias,
dreams, neurotic symptoms, etc., has given a new look to
the whole study of mankind by man. His place among the
giants of the history of knowledge is secure. It is not nec
essary to pretend that he explored a new world and a new
order of being, neither mind nor matter.

* It skmM not be thought that Freud invented this dark continent. The
idea of it was familiar to him, and to all German intellectuals, in the meta
physics of Eduard von Hoffman, whose remarkable book, The Philosophy
of the Unconscious, published in 1859, went through eleven editions dur
ing Freud's life. Von Hoffman did not claim to have explored this region,
but arrived by abstract reasoning at a knowledge of what was to be found
tibere: will and intellect, namely, in a state of conflict.

Two Bertrand Russells

B,

"ertrand Russell is the most readable o living high
brows; he also knows more than any of the rest of them.
When Lenin died, his adoring disciples had his brain exam
ined with a microscope to see if it differed in some occult
way from the normal. Bertrand Russell's might be better
worth examining, for it is a more variously prodigious spec
imen. George Santayana, in the final volume of his mem
oirs, described "Bertie" as the most gifted of ail the men
he had known.

"He had birth, genius, learning, indefatigable zeal and
energy, brilliant intelligence, and absolute honesty and
courage. His love of justice was as keen as his sense of
humor. He was at home in mathematics, in natural science,

GREAT COMPANIONS

and in history. He knew well all the more important lan
guages and was well informed about everything going on in
the world of politics and literature."

That is high praise indeed, but Santayana added that as
a great intellect Russell had somehow "petered out." In
discussing the subject with me he said, more harshly:
"Along with his genius he has a streak of foolishness."

I was reminded of this when reading a- review by Maurice
Hindus of Russell's recent book, Portraits From Memory
and Other Essays. Hindus praises the book highly, as any
good critic must, but also remarks: "The goddess he wor
ships is Sprightliness, and she can make him do and say
silly things at times ..." I should say irresponsible or
light-minded, rather than foolish or silly things, but I have
long shared this two-fold opinion of Bertrand Russell: un
bounded admiration for his mind, and a certain embarrass
ment about this trait of his character.

He is a funny-looking fellow, rather like some eager-
beaked bird, or birdlike gargoyle, and I sometimes wonder
what effect this had on him as he grew up. To discover the
finest brain of the generation in such a receptacle must
have been a surprise. He is not unpleasantly grotesque,
however, but pleasantly so when you see his eyes lighted
with interest in an idea.

It was thirty-two years ago (November 21, 1927) that he
and I entertained a crowded Cooper Union with a debate
on The Road to Freedom, and I came home and wrote
down the title of this essay: "Two Bertrand Russells." I had
then read some of Russell's philosophic writings, notably
Our Knowledge of the External World as a Field for Scien
tific Method in Philosophy. The title is almost as long as

Two Bertrand Russells 195

the book, and is not logically constructed, it seems to me.
It should read: "The Problem of our Knowledge of the
External World, etc. . . ." But the book itself is brief and
is logical to a degree rarely to be found in books of philos
ophy, even the most famous. They are all, with but two or
three exceptions, dedicated to proving, or building into a
conception of the universe, some notion that is satisfactory
to the emotional needs of the philosopher. This, at least
was my firm opinion after emerging from a four-year course
in philosophy. I cherished a feeling of admiring kinship
with the few so-called skeptics Hume, Montaigne, Sextus
Empiricus, Protagoras perhaps men who had attempted
without any other motive to find out what could be known
about the plight of man's mind in the universe. I believed,
and believe still, that Bertrand Russell belongs among these
cool and elevated spirits, and that in a wise history of phi
losophy his place would be secure. For that reason I ap
proached the meeting in Cooper Union somewhat awed by
the honor of being associated in conflict with so great a
mind.

Proposed Roads to Freedom was the title of a book that
Russell had published, and my opening speech, which as
usual I wrote out and delivered from memory, was as
thoughtful a criticism of it as I knew how to make. Indeed
for those in the audience with a taste for proletarian revolu
tion, it must have seemed quite conclusive. I took a back
ward glance at all the great advocates of a better social sys
tem, and pointed out that none of them, from Plato to
Russell, had ever even looked for the road to freedom.
They had merely told us what a free society might be like
when we got there. Karl Marx, I declaimed and I was

I4 GREAT COMPANIONS

then immature enough to regard this as very wise did not
bother his head about what it would be like when we got
there. He concentrated on finding the road: the working-
class struggle, namely, for the conquest of political power.

Russell replied, as I would now, that this was all very
much more neat than convincing, that it was impossible to
treat human history as though it were a process taking place
in a laboratory words, at least, to that effect. And he re
marked how many years had passed since Marx predicted
the revolutionary change I was still waiting for, and spoke
of the folly of any man's imagining that he could predict
the course of history over a long period of time.

"Not one of us can tell right now what is going to hap
pen in the next seven years," he exclaimed.

Toward the end of his speech which was not a speech,
but just brilliant inconsecutive talking he happened ac
cidentally, as any impromptu speaker might, to get to
telling us, rather explicitly, what might be expected of the
rest of the twentieth century. It was a bad accident, and I
made some good fun in my rebuttal out of the striking con
trast between the prophetic genius of Karl Marx and of
Bertrand Russell. His answer was magnanimous, and also
clever. He acknowledged that with this lucky crack I had
probably won the debate, but remarked that this did not
prove the validity of the theory of progress through class
struggle.

We walked across town together after the debate, and I
tried to get him to say something illuminating about my
teacher, John Dewey, toward whose instrumental philoso
phy I was still struggling to orient myself.

Two Bertrand Rwzells 195

"I find him such a dull writah," was all I could get out of
him.

I don't know why, but though I have often met Russell
since, and ridden in taxis with him, and dined beside him,
and made speeches from the same platform, I have never
been able to get much farther into a conversation than that.
Something rises up between us whether my too humble
admiration for his mind, or an opinion on his part that I
haven't any mind, I can't pretend to say. Mathematics, of
course, is an alarming thing to a man of my temper and ex
perience. Although I passed examinations in both algebra
and trigonometry, not to mention plane and solid geome
try, I could not at this moment describe the binomial the
orem, or state what a logarithm is, if the sword of Damocles
were hanging over me. So perhaps it is just the phantom
of Mathematics that rises up between us, putting me in my
place with that mystic and impenetrable gesture that has
the whole world of unciphering mortals buffaloed.

At any rate, this memoir will contain only one more
phrase spoken to me by Bertrand Russell. That, too, was cm
the way home from our debate, and what he said was and
he said it disdainfully "Anyone who takes these debates
and lectures of ours seriously must be an idiot.** I had
taken my part of it seriously as my manuscript testifies, and
whatever may have been my answer, I recoiled inwardly
from this remark. As he was then making an enviable in
come out of these debates and lectures, playing up to the
eagerness of a half-baked American intelligentsia to gaze
upon, and gather pearls of wisdom from, a great British
philosopher, this roused my democratic indignation. I

196 GREAT COMPANIONS

thought he ought to give the best he had for the money and
adulation he was getting. I also thought at that time
that his political opinions were as trivial and superficial as
his philosophic speculations were profound. That was the
source of my title: "Two Bertrand Russells." I now see
that his answer to my neat speech, in spite of that accidental
lowering of his guard, was a good one. But I still resent his
flippant attitude to that attentive audience. There is a
point of view from which nothing that any of us "intellec
tuals" do or think seems very important. But from that
point of view, I am not sure a book in the library on the
Principles of Mathematics ranks so much higher than a
speech in Cooper Union on the Road to Freedom. I would
like to find the same Bertrand Russell in both places.

I will give another example of what I mean. Not so many
years ago I attended a lecture by him in the Rand School
for Social Science. It was a lecture on Aristotle, and was at
tended by a throng of young boys and girls, mostly work
ing-class, all hungrily drinking up with burningly attentive
eyes whatever gems of wisdom and guidance they could get
from this famous and truly great man. And the great man
delivered a very fine lecture a chapter perhaps from his
History of Western Philosophy. He was particularly illumi
nating on the subject of the virtue which Aristotle called
megalopsychia, and which is often but incorrectly trans
lated "magnanimity." It means something more like high-
mindedness or dignity of spirit. You might say that it means
"what noblesse obliges," for it is essentially an aristocratic
virtue. Russell was engaging and wonderfully subtle in de
scribing it. But afterward one of those burning-eyed young
sters, a girl in her teens, breathless with bashfulness and a

Two Bertrand Russelk *97

zeal to understand, asked him a question not a penetrat
ing question perhaps, but not foolish. He brushed her off
and out of the intellectual world with some frivolous jest
about consulting Mrs. Aristotle. As I watched her sink back
miserably into her chair, I thought: "Well, he has given a
perfect discourse on megalopsychia and a perfect example
of the lack of it."

It must have been after that lecture, for it was in an ante
room at the Rand School, that Bertrand Russell confided to
me the genuinely desperate financial situation he was in.
His radical opinions, particularly about military patriotism
and marriage, had closed all the innumerable chairs of
philosophy that would otherwise have been open to him.
To climax this hardship, he had just been summarily
ejected from a professorship at the rambunctious art foun
dation in Philadelphia established by the Argyrol king and
ex-prize fighter and cranky connoisseur, Albert G. Barnes,
He told me with genuine distress in his voice that he really
did not know how he was going to earn his living.

This will surprise the reader now, but hardly more than
it surprised me then. I was indeed so appalled that a great
mind should be in such a plight and my admiration for
the delving mind was so much stronger than my distaste for
the flippant tongue that I went over the next morning to
the New School for Social Research, and pleaded with its
founder and director, Alvin Johnson, to give Bertrand Rus
sell a job! Both Johnson and the New School, I thought,
were bold enough to stand up to public opinion in such a
cause. I realized how little Russell had exaggerated his
plight when I received my answer. Johnson listened pa
tiently, with the genial twinkle in his eyes and the genial

IQO GREAT COMPANIONS

pipe in his mouth that are both a part of him, and when my
plea was finished, removed the pipe with friendly delibera
tion and said:

"Max, I agree with everything you said . . . But the
question will have to come before the trustees. I will put it
before them, but I can advise you in advance not to hope
for a favorable answer."

The two-fold nature of Bertrand Russell has given rise to
some other interesting reactions besides those I quoted.
W, B. Yeats, in an imaginary letter to a schoolmaster about
his son's education, made this amusing remark: "Teach
him mathematics as thoroughly as his capacity permits. I
know that Bertrand Russell must, seeing that he is such a
featherhead, be wrong about everything but as I have no
mathematics I cannot prove it. I do not want my son to be
as helpless." Even the Encyclopaedia Britannica shares this
two-way attitude toward the great philosopher. It describes
him in a biographical essay as "temperamentally desperate,
loving extremes . . . almost querulously criticising the
world's workings," and declares ironically that he "has been
peculiarly successful in eliciting from contemporary physics
those theorems that are most consonant with his own tem
per/' But when it comes to getting an article on the most
subtle and difficult subject in the whole encyclopedia, one
requiring acuity and balance as well as learning of the most
reliable kind, the article on Knowledge itself what we can
know and how we know it the editors turn to Bertrand
Russell! *

I have a feeling, which I cannot verify, that the trivial

* I owe this observation to C. K. Ogden, writing on * 4 Tbe New Britannica"
in the Storday Review of Literature, October 25, 1926.

Two Bertrand Russelh 199

and irresponsible member of this dual personality is apt to
be uppermost when he is dealing with America. Many
other distinguished Europeans have come overseas annually
to tap the gold mine of our provincial adoration of Old
World Culture it was natural enough but most of them
tried hard, however unsuccessfully, to give a good lecture.
Yeats, for instance, according to his biographer, "always
gave of his best . . . and this consideration sprang no less
from his inborn courtesy than from a sense of his own dig
nity and what was due to others.** But Bertrand Russell was
content merely to stand up and chatter about ideas. Per
haps, indeed, he was the only one who could stand up and
chatter about ideas without fear of exhausting the reservoir,
or losing control of the taps. I cannot help doubting, how
ever, whether in lectures to a British audience he would
have been quite so cavalier. "Love of England," he says in
this recent book, "is very nearly the strongest emotion I
possess" a statement so surprising in one whose closest
companion seems to have been the universe that it adds
weight to my feeling that in order to understand him we
have to divide him in two.

Russell himsef contributes a little to this feeling. "The
serious part of my life ever since boyhood," he says, "has
been devoted to two different objects. ... I wanted, on
the one hand, to find out whether anything can be known;
and, on the other, to do whatever might be possible toward
creating a happier world." He adds that he has found his
work on social questions "much more difficult and much
less successful" than his earlier work on mathematical logic.
He thinks it is more difficult "because its utility depends
upon persuasion." My feeling is that on social (and polk-

2OO GREAT COMPANIONS

ical) questions, he is inclined to spend more time in per
suasion than in doing the work the work, I mean, of es
tablishing valid opinions. It is in this sphere, at least, that
the light-minded Bertrand Russell seems so often to have
sway.

Having said this, I must hasten to add that in 1920, when
he paid his visit to Soviet Russia, Bertrand Russell arrived
with speed at an opinion that time has verified. He was
right when most of us who shared his bold views about
World War One were making the mistake of our lives. He
is entitled to all the boasting he so genteelly refrains from
doing about that fact. At that early date, his adverse report
on the "Great Experiment" said pretty nearly everything
that the rest of us wasted so much time in summoning the
mental force or humility to say. It was not as though he had
gone over there with adverse prejudices, either. On the con
trary, a month or so before boarding the train, he had is
sued a startling announcement of his conversion to Com
munism. He had to take that announcement back while it
was still floating like a flag almost from the masthead of
all pro-Bolshevik publications throughout the western
world.

The memory touches me rather deeply because it was in
my magazine, The Liberator, that he published the origi
nal confession of his faith. We printed it in extra-sized type
on the first pages of the magazine, rejoicing that we had
now a comrade-in-arms who would strike respect at least,
if not fear, into the hearts of our enemy, the general public.
He did not send his recantation to the Liberator, but to
our rival the Nation, wishing perhaps to save me a rather
painful embarrassment, for I believed in free discussion as

Two Bertrand Ru$sells 201

well as proletarian revolution and should have had to pub
lish it. As it was, I felt compelled to answer the great phi
losopher, and I did so with all the scholarly heft I could
muster, entitling my essay, "Plato, Nietzsche and Bertrand
Russell." I am happy to recall that I did not dismiss his re
cantation as a class-conscious reaction, although that would
have been made easy by the fact that his traveling com
panion, Robert Williams, head of the British Transport
Workers' Union, came back with an exactly opposite reac
tion: "All my previous hopes and expectations were more
than borne out by my actual contact with Soviet affairs/* I
brushed this easy argument aside, and answered according
to my own pretty thoroughly un-Marxian type of revolu
tionism.

"It is possible," I said, "for persons of drastic and pure
intellect, or militantly sympathetic emotion, to abstract
from their own economic or social situation, conceive the
process of revolutionary struggle scientifically, and put
their personal force in on the side where lie the ultimate
hopes of human life." And I paid a special tribute to Rus
sell's capacity for such disinterested logic, his champion
ship of "scientific method in philosophy/* "What is It," I
asked, "that prevents him from bringing over that austere
and celebrated method into his contemplation of the prob
lems of society? It is the contagious Christian disease of ide
alizing the soft, and worshipping the ineffectual/*

So I disposed of this most devastating intrusion on my
state of exalted belief, Bertrand Russell was In China when
my editorial essay came out. His wife, Dora Russell, wrote
a ponderous answer to it, and he sent her manuscript to me
saying that it expressed his views. I am not by any means a

2O2 GREAT COMPANIONS

touchy person; my inferiority complex takes other forms
than that. But I must confess I was not flattered by this left-
handed, or no-handed, way of answering my studious and
deeply pondered criticism of his changed opinion. Twice
since then, once in a letter, once in a personal encounter,
Bertrand Russell has reproached me for betraying the prin
ciple of free discussion in not publishing his wife's letter.
On neither occasion did I say in reply what I thought
should be obvious that I did not care to advertise the po
sition he put me in by replying to my dissertation through
an unknown woman who happened to be his wife. I can
not help wondering, since I am still in the vicinity of that
subject, whether he would have sent such a communication
to a British editor.

I wish I might feel as happily confident as I did in those
days about that "hard-headed idealism" which I regarded
as the heart of the Marxian doctrine when purged of Hege
lian metaphysics. My present feeling when Bertrand Rus
sell expresses his "firm conviction" that "the only stable im
provements in human affairs are those which increase
kindly feeling and diminish ferocity," is one of nostalgia. I
was brought up to think so, and I would like to go back to
my childhood. But I do not believe we can increase kindly
feeling and diminish ferocity on a large scale except by
selective breeding. And I still think that the political Ber
trand Russell fails to confront such facts with that unre
mitting, diligent and disciplined hardness of mind with
which the philosophic Bertrand Russell confronts a propo
sition in logic or mathematics. One cannot be so sure, it is
true, about political as about mathematical matters, but
one can require of himself that he be as sure as possible be-

Two Bertrand Russells

fore advising the world. And this, it seems to me, is what
the political member o the Bertrand Russell combination
fails to do. His recantation after the visit to Soviet Russia
was an act of admirable devotion to an ascertained truth;
it is beyond praise. But was not his startling proclamation
of a conversion to Communism just before he went, by the
same token, somewhat cursory and careless?

Bertrand Russell has made a good many such startling
shifts of opinion in the course of his work on social ques
tions, more, by a good deal, than the changing conditions
have warranted. I remember it cannot be so long ago
his announcing in the New Leader that love, after all, is
the only force that can save the world. Yet in 1948, in an
address at Westminster School which he took pains to
publish, he said:

"There must be in the world only one armed force supra
national and all-powerful ... It is the only way to pre
vent Great Wars. There is singularly little hope of estab
lishing such a force by international agreement. . . . The
Western Alliance with the United States and the Common
wealth have the nucleus of such a force. It must impose it
self on the whole world, and remain powerful, uniquely so,
until the world has been educated into a unified sanity."

A very far call from love as the savior of the world.

Though sprightly enough, none of these rapid changes
seems quite so featherweight as his shift of passion and
opinion in the last seven years on the subject of the fight
against Communism, In 1950, in the New York Times
Magazine, he issued a battle cry that must have roused
thousands who care about real values to join in that fight*
He depicted with militant eloquence the horrors of life un-

2O4 GREAT COMPANIONS

der the Communist dictatorship: "Soviet man, crawling on
his knees to betray his family and friends to slow butch
ery**; "A world in which human dignity counts for noth
ing"; a world in which "it is thought right and proper that
men should be groveling slaves, bowing down before the
semi-divine beings who embody the greatness of the state.

"It is this conception that we have to fight," he cried, "a
conception which . . . would, if it prevailed, take every
thing out of life that gives it value, leaving nothing but a
regimented collection of groveling animals. I cannot imag
ine a greater or more profound cause for which to fight."

During the eight years since that battle call was issued,
the "regimented collection of groveling animals," with no
change in its nature, has steadily gained ground through
out the world. The fight to which we were so gloriously
summoned, though more desperate, is still being fought.
And what has become of our intellectual standard bearer
now, our great philosopher who came down from the
heights of pure reason to summon us into battle for "all
human values?" He sits aloft once more and informs us that
"anti-Communism" may be classified with Communism as
a "dogmatic and fanatical belief in some doctrine for which
there is no evidence." "Nationalism, Fascism, Communism,
and now anti-Communism," he says, "have all produced
their crop of bigoted zealots ready to work untold horror
in the interests of some narrow creed." *

And to certify this surrender to the enemy of all human
values, he contributes a preface to another book written by
one of the most unabashed defenders of that "regimented
collection of groveling animals" in the western world, Cor-

* Portraits From Memory , p. 38.

Two Bertrand Russelk 205

liss Lamont.* In this preface he reaches the climax of a
series of slanders against America that would, in a man less
famed for the achievements of his mind, seem very nearly
insane. I will quote but one example of this wild talk, since
it is no pleasure to dwell on these flights of the feather-like
partner in the firm of Bertrand Russell.

"Members of the FBI join even mildly liberal organiza
tions as spies and report any unguarded word. Anybody
who goes so far as to support equal rights for colored peo
ple, or to say a good word for the UN, is liable to visit by
officers of the FBI and threatened, if not with persecution,
at least with blacklisting and consequent inability to earn
a living. When a sufficient state of terror has been produced
by these means, the victim is informed that there is a way
out: if he will denounce a sufficient number of his friends,
he may obtain absolution."

I imagine that Bertrand Russell regards it as an example
of unprejudiced logic to liken the extremes of intolerance
to which the passion of the fight against Communism has
carried certain individuals in America to the systemized
brutalities of the totalitarian police state. To my mind it
suggests, rather, a deep-lying and irrational prejudice.

But that is not the point I wished to make in concluding
this essay. The error underlying everything Russell now
says about the "great fight" to which he summoned us so
gloriously was present already in the summons. It is not a
"conception" we have to fight, but a conspiracy a conspir
acy by seizing political power to force that conception upon
an unwilling world. The problem is indeed complex and

* Freedom Is as Freedom Does. Preface in the English edition only.

206 GREAT COMPANIONS

subtle how a relatively free society can, without destroying
its own freedom, defeat such a conspiracy. There is room
here for a wide latitude of opinion. But no opinion deserves
respect which ignores the fact that it is a conspiracy. Not
only did Russell ignore this in his original battle cry; he ig
nores it now when the whole thinking world is alive to it.
He might without loss of dignity argue against the congres
sional investigation of subversive activities, but when he
calls them "supposed subversive activities" (my italics), it
appears that he has not had enough conscience or intellec
tual pride to study the subject he is persuading us about.
He has not examined the programmatic literature of inter
national Communism, or given a glance to such critical
texts on the subject as Sidney Hook's Heresy Yes Conspir
acy N&. He is avoiding, as though deliberately, the factors
in his problem which make it difficult to solve. That is not
the way one employs his mind when delving to the logical
Principles of Mathematics, or attempting to establish be
yond a possibility of doubt the extent and limitations of
human knowledge. For his own sake, as well as ours, we
have to perceive that there are two Bertrand Russells, one
disciplined and conscientious, the other glib and in a meas
ure irresponsible.

Charlie Chaplin: Memories and Reflections

M,

Lotoring down from Paris to Florence not long ago,
I paused at Vevey on the Lake of Geneva and drove up
the hill to the villa where Charlie Chaplin is living his
new life, surrounded with green sloping lawns, wide-
spreading trees, and six if you can believe it, six beau
tiful children. It is so amazing a conclusion to the life he is
supposed to have led, and so large a surprise even to me,
his quite close friend in the life he did lead, that I felt I
must have a look at it. We had a very beautiful Muriel, a
Parisian girl, in the car with us, and this, I was sure, would
mitigate an unannounced intrusion on Charlie's fastidi
ously private life. Nobody showed up for a long time after
I announced to the butler an old friend from America.

208 GREAT COMPANIONS

Finally, as we stood waiting, Muriel espied a grey head
peering from an upstairs sun-deck to see who we were.
Whether it was her beauty or my identity that brought him
down, I don't know, but in a few seconds Charlie appeared
at the door with a beaming smile and a two-handed wel
come. He was nervous though at least that was Eliena's
opinion and Muriel's. He led us all over the estate, point
ing out all the trees and flowers, the stone walls, the tennis
court, the garage, the vegetable garden, and talking a blue
streak all the time. He seemed, in their opinion, to be
trying to put off the moment when I would say what I came
for. I too noticed that his stream of talk was continuous
and there were no questions in it, but it did not occur to me
that our political differences might be prominent in his
mind, and he might think I had come on some sort of
propaganda mission. Whether that was true or not, the
tension did not relax and the talk become general, until we
got back to the house and Oona came down to serve tea
gracious and warm and simple-mannered and a child or
two showed up for a biscuit. Then Charlie's apprehen
sion, if he had one, disappeared, and he seemed to realize
that I had dropped in for old friendship's sake and nothing
else.

He was the most famous man in the world when I met
him in 1919. Woodrow Wilson had just made a triumphal
passage through the capitals of Europe, but vaster crowds
would have followed Charlie Chaplin. In the History of
Great Fame when that book is written no chapter will
be more astounding than that in which this little modest
actor of one role, his birth timed and his genius cut and

Charlie Chaplin 209

trimmed to fit a new kind of entertainment, became in
three short years known and loved by more men, and more
races and classes of men, than anyone, even the great re
ligious leaders, ever had been before.

The story will give pause to those who think that subtle
and mature art is incompatible with mass popularity. For
Chaplin's acting was mainly distinguished from that of his
colleagues by what, to my mind at least, is the subtlest and
most mature of all values, power in reserve. He loves to
not quite do something, letting his audience feel the more
exquisitely what it would be if he did it.

Our friendship began on the note of this mutual taste. I
was rather notorious at the moment, being about the only
Socialist agitator who had opposed the World War and
supported the Russian revolution, and yet managed to stay
out of jail. I traveled to the West Coast soon after the Ar
mistice, while the famous "Palmer raids" were still sup
pressing what they called sedition. It was more like a sortie
from a besieged city than a lecture tour. My meetings were
the first opportunity the radicals had had for a long two
years to make their voices heard, and they came out in
mobs. The police came too. There were forty of them lined
up like great blue smooth-feathered birds-of-prey around
the inside of the Philharmonic Auditorium where I spoke
in Los Angeles. My friend Bob Wagner came up after
wards, while I was shaking hands with people, and whis
pered:

"Charlie Chaplin is in the wings and would like to meet
you!"

If he had said "Julius Caesar," I would not have been

210 GREAT COMPANIONS

more astonished or delighted. To crown my delight, Char
lie's first words when we shook hands were in genuine ad
miration of what he termed my eloquence.

"You have what I consider the essence of all art/' he said,
"even of mine, if I may call myself an artist restraint."

"Well did you see those policemen?" I said.

But we both knew that was not what he meant. For my
part, I was so surprised to hear just that remark coming out
of Hollywood that it has remained verbatim in my mem
ory: "If I may call myself an artist!"

We had supper together that night, and the next day I
went out to the little row of English-village houses on La
Brea Avenue that formed the street front of his studio. It
was the only studio in Hollywood that did not look like a
freight yard. We swam together in his marble pool, and
talked again all afternoon, and had our "movie" taken
eating raw lemons like apples off a tree. I was, as almost
everyone is, quite as captivated by the real Chaplin as by
the Chaplin on the screen.

Humor is a playful thing: it isn't there if you take it
seriously. It is natural, therefore, that the world's favorite
humorist should have turned out to be the world's most
charming playmate. I would back Charlie Chaplin against
anyone I ever met to cast a spell if he wanted to over
the most hardboiled and leather-hided visitor of either sex
that you could bring around. Something, however, deeper
than his charm appealed to me in him that day. Perhaps
his prodigious fame had to do with it; any instinctive hero-
worshipper has a weakness in that direction. But that was
not all. Charlie Chaplin seemed to my mind and my imme
diate perceptions a great man, and I was moved, with that

Charlie Chaplin sn

in the back of my head, to study and try to understand
him. Maybe my understanding of him will throw some
light on his equivocal position in the world today.

Most entertaining people are egotistically aware of it,
but Charlie has a deep modesty. Like all actors, of course
and actors in this are very much like human beings he
would rather be in the center of the stage than off in a cor
ner. But he has the gift of admiring others, and the rarer
gift of listening to them with vivid and prolonged interest.
He is high-strung and aesthetic, with an instantaneous dis
taste for anything false-faced or cheap, and no hesitation
about extruding it from his attention or abruptly leaving
it. That got him lots of enemies, especially in Hollywood
where plenty was false-faced and cheap. But among people
he likes he is in the depth of his heart humble, a poor boy
who had no opportunities and is eager to learn. Once long
ago, but when already at the height of his prodigious fame,
he showed me with the pride of a child who has won a
prize, a letter of appreciation from H. G. Wells.

"He's quite a writer, isn't he? Isn't he pretty well
thought of?" he said, putting the treasured letter carefully
back in his breast pocket.

Next to this ability to receive as well as to give, without
which all charm is brassy and hard-surfaced, I found the
main elements of Charlie's magnetism to be a restless in
tellect and imagination, humor, good looks, grace, agility,
and a gift of bringing, or if need be dancing, everything he
mentions into being by the instinctive motions that accom
pany his speech. I say "intellect" with malice toward some,
who, lacking the real thing themselves, liked to think that
Charlie's endless, genuine, and fertile interest in thinking

212 GREAT COMPANIONS

was a pose. People naturally at home in the world of ideas
are always thus misjudged if they happen to be alive also in
the world of things. Charlie is alive all the way around. He
never had any schoolroom discipline to speak of, and he
reads a big book like Spengler's Decline of the West, for
instance, by a hop-skip-and-jump process that is remote in
deed from scholarship. But he makes no bluff to the con
trary not with me, at least. And he offers what he has to
say about such a book as a curious shell picked up in a
stroll along the beach, not a compendium of the ocean.
The shell is always curious, always relevant, always has
some curve or color of its own. That is why I say he has
intellect as well as imagination.

"In the matter of reading," he said to me once, "I am
an Epicurean a very little food for thought is enough!"

"I went and bought a lot of books/* he said at another
time, "and now I've got to read them! But I have to be
choosy because I'm a very slow reader. It's hard for me to
concentrate on a book. For that reason I hardly read mod
em literature at all. Only very recently I discovered Joyce's
short stories. Some of those I've read three or four times.
That one story Clay says more about human character in
ten pages than ten volumes of Dickens."

Charlie's eyes are of the very darkest blue, the color that
the camera likes best. They are "honest" and "unflinching"
eyes, set deeply in a noble brow, and when he lies to people
because he does not like them or their questions, they make
him very persuasive. They have filled the world full of
contradictory stories about him, all honestly believed a
state of affairs pleasing to him because of his reticence. The
lower part of his face is not so noble as his brow and eyes,

Charlie Chaplin 213

his mouth not quite so unflinching. But the trim grace and
veritable perfection of his build and carriage, which is that
of the prince of tumblers, tap dancers, tightrope walkers
the prince of agility and poise harmonize with the classic
perfection of his head to make a unitary impression of great
beauty. He seems to possess, above all, complete and ex
quisite integration.

And this too is misleading or was at the time of our
friendship for he impressed me then as having no unity
of character, no principles or conviction, nothing in his
head that, when he laid it on the pillow, you could sensibly
expect would be there in the morning. He was an actor so
deep down and completely that, if you let his charm be
witch you into resting any hope on what he said, you would
certainly sooner or later find that hope floating in the air.

"Oh I know Charlie well we're intimate friends. In
fact, he's dining at my house tomorrow. Why don't you
drop in and meet him?" Thousands of people have said
that, almost everybody, in fact, with whom Charlie ever
enjoyed a long evening's conversation. And they have said
it, usually, to all their best or most important Mends and
relatives. The friends and relatives have dropped in, all
of them, bringing their important friends and relatives
along. The board has been made festive, the cocktails
have been passed around, the conversation has grown un
naturally animated, the ringing of the doorbell has been
awaited with eagerness surprise impatience consterna
tion mortification despair and Charlie never heard
from again from that day to this.

Nobody "knew Charlie well" who did not know how
deep down he was an actor. Barring a few elementary

214 GREAT COMPANIONS

trends like a fine distaste for shoddy, an intellectual sym
pathy for revolutionists, a collector's mania toward dollars,
and a frank and reliable liking for his own ease and com
fort, it was safest not to bank on his qualities at all much
less his opinions. The day after he so praised my radical
speech in Los Angeles I heard him express a glowing be
lief in slavery as an immortal institution, backing it up
with arguments and illustrating it with a pantomime that
left his hearers breathless if not convinced. About the same
time 1920-21 he made this remark: "Any perfectly free
and profound intelligence would be Bolshevik today.
H, L. Mencken, for instance, if he should really get down
and study the problems of life. But I hope he won't, for
he's more entertaining as an acrobat."

To the best of my belief he expressed both these opin
ions, or acted both these parts, without any mental reserva
tions, and he has acted many others quite as contradictory
and conclusive. His genius is essentially dramatic, and in
the long run subtle understanding has to content you in
the place of character. It did content me, and I think that
is one reason why we were good friends for so many years.
I sensed very early, through watching with keen attention
these wholly unintegrated flights of his mind, that he could
not be relied upon to be, or continue to be, anything in
particular, and I never expected him to. If he was irrespon
sible toward me, instead of nursing the injury, I cured it
by being irresponsible toward him. Chained down as I am
by a puritan conscience in matters of social obligation, I
enjoyed the moral holiday.

Another matter in which I got "wise" to Charlie very
early was that collector's mania I spoke of. I was raising

Charlie Chaplin

money for our magazine, The Liberator, on the trip West
when I first met him, and when he so generously praised
my speech I hoped he might react similarly to an appeal
for funds by my traveling companion, Isaac McBride. He
did say he wanted to help, and said it with some warmth,
and then gave us twenty-five dollars. If he had said he
didn't want to help and given us twenty-five dollars, I
would have learned something else. As it was, I learned
right there never to try to drag Charlie in, as I did most of
my rich friends, on various schemes of social reform.
Charlie liked radical ideas; he liked to talk about trans
forming the world; but he didn't like to pay for the talk,
much less the transformation.

Of course, when you've made an emphatic remark like
that about a born actor, you have to turn right around and
make another almost opposite. Once Charlie happened to
arrive in New York just as our bookkeeper ran away with
the last three thousand dollars in The Liberator's till, I re
ceived a lot of commiseration from all sides, but Charlie
said the only thing that seemed to me halfway logical He
said:

"I can't make it all up to you, but I've got a thousand I
can spare."

He isn't stingy, you see. It is more subtle than that. He
is anxious about money. He might just as well have given
me the whole three thousand, or a million. But he
couldn't, because he lives in dread of poverty. He grew up
in dread of poverty* When he was nine, his mother took
him to an orphan asylum and left him there for two years
because she could not feed him. Experiences like that in
childhood leave channels of scar tissue in which the feelings

GREATCOMPANIONS

flow, no matter what the mind says. Charlie is afraid all
the time that he will be taken to that orphan asylum again.
I spent a luxurious month once in his house on Summit
Avenue, and the coffee came up every morning not in cups,
but in two-handled soupbowls from which one of the han
dles had been broken off. It seemed a sensible idea they
were just like cups but somehow it didn't fit into the gen
eral atmosphere of life among the movie millionaires of
Beverly Hills. It was the little waif Chaplin, the poor boy
from London's East End, almost the same one you saw on
the screen, being careful about expense.

The harvest days of our friendship were in 1920 and
1921, when I went out to Hollywood to be far from The
Liberator and near a beautiful actress I loved while
writing a book on The Sense of Humor. Charlie was de
voted to my actress too, and our friendship became a three-
cornered one in which a lot of unusual emotions were
given a place in the sun. As I look back upon those winters,
Charlie and I seem to have been together almost every
evening, playing charades and the speechmaking game and
the drama game. We had to give up charades finally, be
cause we found our whole energy going into all-night ses
sions of it, and neither of us doing a stroke of work in the
daytime.

I must explain that those charades of ours were not little
impromptu guessing games; they were elaborately worked
out dramas and scenic spectacles, in the preparation of
which all human experience and the entire contents of
Charlie's house would be levied on. His dining room
opened through a wide archway into the library, and it had
two exits at the opposite corners, one into the kitchen and

Charlie Chaplin 217

one that went upstairs. There was a curtain in the archway
that could be drawn, and thus the whole living part of the
house would be converted into a theater. Without disturb
ing the guests, you could sneak up those back stairs and
ransack their wardrobes, if any of them had had the hardi
hood to come for the night. Charlie and I would al
ways choose the sides, and we would choose them the day
before, inviting to dinner those whom we each wanted on
our team. We got so expert at this game that we thought a
charade was no good if it didn't have continuity the first
syllable being the first act of a play, the next the second
act, etc.

It is not easy to get people into a mood at once energetic
enough and relaxed enough to enter into such exploits, and
that is where the speech-making game came in. It was a
creation of mine, a revenge I took for my long years of
suffering before audiences who wouldn't give me any help.

We played it this way: one end of the room would be
cleared of people, and regarded as a platform. Everyone
would write the subject of a speech cm a slip of paper, fold
it tight, and drop it into a hat. We always had to warn
them to write a serious subject, not a funny one the fun
would come afterward. And we had to make everyone in
the room honestly agree to play: if anyone hung back, they
all would. Then the host or ringmaster whoever was en
gineering the game would take out his watch, and pass
the hat to the first person on the left of the platform. He
or she had to draw a folded paper from the hat, mount
the platform, face the audience, unfold and read it aloud,
and make a speech one minute long on the subject read.
If he could not think of a word to say, he had to stand there

2l8 GREAT COMPANIONS

facing the audience just the same, until the minute was up.

It is one way of finding out how long a minute is. And
it is an unfailing means of limbering people up to the
point of playing charades. After they have suffered through
one of those lonely minutes, they are ready for anything
that is done in company.

Charlie improved on my speech-making game by passing
two hats, in one of which a subject was dropped, in the
other the description of a character. Then we had to make
a speech on the subject and in the character. This soon in
volved costumes and became almost as formidable as cha
rades. I vividly remember Charlie as a "Toothless Old
Veteran" discoursing on "The Benefits of Birth Control."
He rises before my mind's eye, too, completely costumed
and made up as Carrie Nation, delivering, hatchet in hand,
a lecture on "Some Doubts as to the Origin of Species." It
was in one of our games that he first preached the sermon
on David and Goliath that forms a hilarious climax in The
Pilgrim. When I saw it my mind traveled back to the eve
ning I first introduced him to the speech-making game, and
he stood up there valiantly for one minute fussed and
embarrassed as a schoolgirl, giggling and saying absolutely
nothing. He was trying to be himself. As soon as he caught
on to the trick of acting a part he adored it.

Charlie devised what we called the drama game, to take
the place of those charades after they got so elaborate that
neither his picture, The Kid, nor my book was getting any
attention at all. For this game we would drop into the hat
titles suitable for one-act plays. We would divide the com
pany into couples, and each couple would draw a subject.
After consultation, and a raid on the wardrobes upstairs,

Charlie Chaplin 219

they would put on a one-act play corresponding to that
title, making up the dialogue as they went along. Of all the
"parlor games" I ever played, that is the best fun.

In Moscow, a little later, I saw this same kind of fun put
on the stage. In the mood of creative adventure that fol
lowed the revolution, an impromptu theater called Semper
Ante was set up by a group of witty actors, and played to
full houses for almost ten years.

Besides these inimitable night's entertainments, the gay
est events of that kind in my life,* I used to hang around
Charlie's studio and watch him make pictures, learning
much of what I put in my book on humor there. He was
doing the cocktail-shaker gag in The Idle Class one after
noon. The hero, you may remember, is an alcoholic, and
he receives a letter from his absent wife saying she will
never come home again unless he stops drinking. He is
standing in front of a table on which sits her portrait, and
also some bottles and" a cocktail shaker. He takes up the
portrait and gazes at it, tears pouring from his eyes and
great sobs shaking him. He turns around to set it down cm
a table, and the sobs continue to shake him, his shoulders
rising more and more rapidly, until the audience can
hardly bear it. Is Charlie going sentimental, after all? Then
he turns gradually back* a look of sublime abstraction in

* To show that this was not a one-sided gaiety, I wiH quote roj Jte
Foyages, the French edition of Ctiarlie's Ettk book describing his trip &>
Europe in 1921:

"Lunch today with Max Eastman, one of my best friends, He teHs me of
a party at his house the same evening, and I gladly accept his invitation.

. . . What an evening! I really escaped from myseM. My emotions ran
the whole gamut from laughter to tears without an artificial moment. It
was lor this that I had left Los Angeles . . .**

22O GREAT COMPANIONS

his eyes and his shoulders in motion because he is gently
agitating a cocktail shaker.

Charlie performed that little act nine times while I
watched him, consulting me each time, of course that too
is a part of his charm and later we went to the projection
room together and chose the best of the nine. It did not
satisfy him, and he went back on the set the next day and
did it nine times more.

It was understood between us that I was going to write
about him some day, and I would often take down remarks
he made, or answers to my prying questions. I asked him
about that cocktail-shaker gag:

"How did it come to you? Did you think it up when you
were writing the scenario, or just happen to do it on the
set?"

I liked his answer even better than the gag.

"Max, it isn't mine at all. It was suggested to me by a
man on the set."

Charlie brought his mother over from England while I
was in Hollywood, and gave her a comfortable house to
pass her last days in. She was a little crazy, but was aware
of it and able to manage it some of the time.

It had been difficult on account of her mental state to
get her into the country, and she had been instructed to be
very careful when talking to the immigration officials. Her
mind got out of hand, however, and her first word when
one of them approached was:

"You are Jesus Christ!"

Then she remembered what she had been told, and
added with a sane and engaging smile:

"I mean by that, sir, that when I looked in your eyes I

Charlie Chaplin 221

realized, notwithstanding the blue cap, that you have a
gentle and spiritual nature!"

She came through with flying colors a perfectly be
witching woman. Almost nobody knew that she was in Hol
lywood, and it was a day in my life when Charlie took me
to see her. She was rosy-faced, red-haired, very cockney
English, a music-hall singer and dancer by profession. She
put on the phonograph and did us a merry little song and
dance. There was a canary on the piano. He chirped in the
midst of her dance, and she stopped her gay expression
turned to utter pathos. "Poor thing, he's lonely here!"
she said, or sang for it was all in time to the music and
then she was dancing merrily again, and she twirled at the
end, and with the last note sat down accurately and lightly
in the chair she had risen from,

Charles Spencer Chaplin, Senior, was an entertainer too
a "topical vocalist" is the way he is billed on a yellowing
poster in his son's possession. Maybe he was a good topical
vocalist nobody seems to know but I thought I saw the
source of Charlie's genius in his mother.

There was a large gap in our friendship after those Hol
lywood days. I went away to Russia and France and was a
long time coming home- Charlie meantime seemed to have
been entertaining the world more with his marital prob
lems than his pictures. 1 hate marital problems, and was
glad the Lita Grey episode evolved to its inevitable end
without my personal attention. Fourteen years had elapsed
since our gay evenings together, when I found myself again
strolling over to the little studio on La Brea Avenue. I
wondered if I would find Charlie as much changed as all
the rest of Hollywood. The lazy little toy village I remem-

222 GREAT COMPANIONS

bered, with Its population of child millionaires, had turned
into a "business center" now. There were three small mem
ory-laden cottages I wanted to get sentimental over, but I
couldn't find them they were gone!

"Will Charlie also have turned into a business center?"
I asked myself. And I asked it with trepidation, for that is
one of the ways in which he could degenerate. At least so I
thought, for I never could understand his passion for the
national currency. Moreover, there was a general impres
sion then that Charlie was about through making pictures.
I found him in the projection room, discussing with his
staff the first two reels of Modern Times, which had just
been run off. Paulette Goddard was there, looking so in
telligently and brightly beautiful that it seemed as though
the heavens themselves had dropped a star into his lap.
And he himself was at the top of his form, standing out in
front of the little audience, entertaining them with an il
lustrated lecture on the picture's merits and defects illus
trated, I mean, with the old inimitable pantomime. I saw
no change to speak oL

We went up to his new home, after he had run off those
two reels for me, and played a game of tennis, and spent a
long evening talking. Far from having degenerated, or be
ing in the least unbalanced about his work, Charlie seemed
to me to have gained both in poise and self-confidence. It
did not bother him that most people thought he was on the
shelf. He answered quite casually when I asked him why
his tempo of production had slowed down from a picture
every seven days on the old Keystone lot to a picture every
seven years.

"I'm more finicky, I guess," he said. "I care more about

Charlie Chaplin

making it good. Besides, it was new the whole industry
was new in those days. Everything was exciting. We had no
scenarios even, at first. We would finish a picture on Satur
day, and say, "Well, now we must get a story for Monday/
On Af onday we wouldn't have a story, but one would de
velop out of the props and the people who happened to be
standing around. You'd say, 'Well, can I have a couple of
policemen this morning?' And if they said yes, you'd say,
'How about a coupla bricks?' And if you got those too,
there was your story. Everybody has slowed up, as a matter
of fact/'

"Yes, but not the way you have," I said, "not so much
that the public is worried for fear they've quit altogether/*

"Well, why worry?" he said. "Why this terrible insist
ence on work? Work is a beastly thing, especially when it
gets to be a kind of religion. 'If you don't work, you can't
eat' they've got to offer us something better than that in
the communist society. It's too damn irksome and nasty. I'd
like to see a state of society where everybody could get up
in the morning and say, 'Well, it's all right, I don't have to
workP

"Look at the animals. They don't put the moral aspect
on life all the time. So many gorgeously beautiful creatures
with poise and dignity! Think of a lion unmolested by
these bustling humans. He lives a magnificent life, works
when he has to, and then sits, leisurely and sufficient, blink
ing at the sunset and playing with the cube!"

I could not possibly help thinking of a lion while he
spoke, for he became the lion. And I could not worry quite
so much about his slower tempo. Within limits, it seemed
reasonable. It seemed, in fact this revolt against the high-

224 GREAT COMPANIONS

pressure production mania that has corrupted so many
American artists another sign of promise in a remarkably
promising young man.

"Besides," he added, "I find less satisfaction than I used
to in merely entertaining people. As one grows older he
wants to do something that will give him some spiritual
satisfaction. I hate that word 'spiritual/ but you know what
I mean."

In one way we had both changed in those fourteen years
our being together no longer compellingly suggested
play. Jimmie Cagney was there, I remember a natural for
the drama game and two other people limber enough to
enter into one of the old hilarious evenings. But something
else wasn't there youth, I suppose, and the gay, intelligent
laughter and vivacity of the girl we had both been so fond
of. Instead of playing we talked, and what we talked about
was work.

I asked him how he had come to make the picture
Modern Times.

"It started from an abstract idea," he said, "an impulse
to say something about the way life is being standardized
and channelized, and men turned into machines and the
way I feel about it. I knew that was what I wanted to do be
fore I thought of any of the details."

I reminded him that he had conceived of the picture
years before, and had even photographed one of the gags.
I described it to him: a beggar sits on the sidewalk at a busy
intersection; the public hurries by, like automata or Ger
man soldiers on the quick-step; every so often one of them
turns briskly aside to hand the beggar a nickel; he receives

Charlie Chaplin

it In the same perfunctory manner and rings It up 00 a cash
register!

"That's modern life, he said to me then, "everything
mechanized and regimented even charity!"

Charlie had completely forgotten this; he did not even
remember the gag. But it is a fact and one which ac
quired some significance later that for several weeks in
1921 he was sowing this brilliant notion abroad in conver
sations, careless, as he always is, with such riches. One of
our playmates in those days was the French director, Mau
rice Tourneur, and it is not unimaginable that through
him Charlie's idea for a modern comedy traveled to France.
When Modern Times came out, Ren Claire and the pro
ducers of A Nous la Liberte sued Charlie Chaplin for pla
giarism. After a while they withdrew the suit wisely, as
my recollection proves. Whatever sins this genius may have
on his conscience (or what takes the place of conscience in
a complete actor), plagiarism is not among them.

I had another book on humor, Enjoyment of Laughter?
in mind, and I fell back that evening into my old habit erf
studying niy gifted friend with pencil in hand- 1 will retail
here what he said about his creative moods and methods.
I asked him if his pictures always start from an abstract
idea, and he hesitated.

"That is the way I like to have them start," he said- "I
like to wake up some morning with a desire to say some
thing a feeling, I suppose I mean, about something. To
take a simpler example, I find the idea of a tramp and a
gamin together attractive. They meet in a patrol wagon
and start life again. That is attractive. I must find out what

226 GREAT COMPANIONS

exactly is the thing that is attractive about it. That's where
the intellect comes in. I must bring this idea or feeling to
the fore. I must bring it to the noetic mind. I must work
back from it to a total situation by reasoning. I enjoy that
phase. I enjoy gnawing at an idea.

"Maybe I enjoy it too much, and that's why I don't pro
duce as often as I used to. These days, if I don't feel jolly I
just put it off. I've got used to these spells of dullness now,
and they don't worry me. They used to worry me to death.
'You're through,' I'd say. 'You've lost your creative streak
for good!' Now I just stay in bed and think. I start in think
ing at seven and finish at four when I'm seeking a story.
It's a pure matter of sticking to it. I've gone as much as a
month without a creative thought, messing around with
some notion that seemed to me as though it ought to con
tain one. 'Hell, you can't make a story out of that/ I'd say.
'Yes, but you can stick to it until a story comes!'

"There's no use just sitting down and waiting for an in
spiration, though. You've got to play along. The main
thing you've got to do is preserve your vitality. A couple of
days of complete rest and solitude helps. Not seeing any
body. I even conserve my emotions. I'm not going to get
excited about anybody or anything/ I say, 'until I get this
gag worked out/ I go along that way, living a quiet and
righteous life, and then I stay out late one night, and have
a couple of drinks perhaps all night and the next morn
ing the reserve pours out. But you've got to have the re
serve. Dissipation is no use except as a release. You've been
damming it up inside of you, and all of a sudden you say:
*Oh, here it is!* And then you go to work/*

A couple of years after Modern Times came out, I re-

Charlie Chaplin 227

ceived a telephone call from Paulette Goddard asking me
if Eliena and I wouldn't come out to Hollywood and stay
with them for a while. She said she thought I would do
Charlie good. I surmised that "do Charlie good" meant get
him to make another picture and put Paulette in it. But
that was all right, and I said I would come if he also wanted
me. I got a telegram the same night:

"Expecting you. Charlie."

For various reasons we put off going for almost two
months, and were extremely casual about it, merely tele
graphing toward the last the probable date of our arrival.
I found Charlie surrounded with a pile of manuscripts al
most half his size.

"I'm learning to write," he said. "All these papers you
see around here are scenarios with dialogues in them."

"You're learning to talk!" I said.

"Well, I may not talk myself. I may just direct a picture
for Paulette, but what I'm interested in now is writing. I
don't see how you do it. It all seems wonderful to me when
it pours out. I thought every one of these sheets was a
masterpiece when I wrote it. But when I look at it the next
day I think it's terrible."

The upshot of it was that he thought we might work
together we had played together so often.

"I really would like to collaborate with you on a talking
picture," he said.

It seemed natural indeed it was not a new idea and
with Paulette's ambition pushing in the same direction, it
even seemed probable. But Eliena, who adored Charlie,
was a good deal more excited about it than I was.

"Remember what I've told you," I said. "Enjoy any

228 GREAT COMPANIONS

Charlie Chaplin you have the good luck of a chance to. But
don't try to link them up into anything you can grasp.
There are too many of them. The one that wants to collab
orate with me is, in my opinion, sensible, but I doubt if
he lives through the night."

He did live through the night and all the next day.
After tennis in the afternoon, Charlie said:

"If you'll come up to my room after breakfast to
morrow well start in by going through some of these
mountains of stuff I've written, and see if any of it is any
good."

The next morning before I got up, Charlie left for
Monterey, thinking he could write better if he got away
from Paulette which, at the moment, was undoubtedly
correct. He left word that I was to have his sunny bedroom
to write in. When he came back to play host again, the idea
of our collaboration had vanished from the agenda. He
never mentioned it again, nor did I. Nor did it make any
difference. I had no complaint. I had paid off his casualness
in advance.

One day, after he had had time to get tired of the social
maelstrom that followed the premiere of The Great Dicta
tor, I sent Charlie a telegram at the Waldorf Astoria:

"Come on up Sunday and bring a companion. I've got a
new game."

When Frank, his Japanese parent-valet, called up to
say that he would come, I invited Edmund Wilson, the
literary critic, and his gifted wife, Mary McCarthy, to
come over from Stamford, and got my friend Charles Rei-
tell, a doctor of sick industries by profession, to bring some
of his intelligence and personality tests along. In inviting

Charlie Chaplin

these guests, I explained that Charlie Chaplin might or
might not be there.

Charlie arrived at noon with a gentle and warm-eyed
companion from Brooklyn, and we played with those tests,
and discussed them, and discussed everything under the
sun, until one-thirty that night. It was like old times in
Hollywood. Somewhat to our surprise Bunny Wilson, who
is a distinctly literary person, made a phenomenal score in
the test for operators of delicate machinery. Dr. Reitell
guaranteed him a sixty-doilar-a-week job on application.
On the same test, I was marked way down for "labored
accuracy." "Don't hire this man" was written across my
sheet.

Charlie pleaded the absence of his reading glasses and
did only one eighth of the test perfectly. The rest of the
time he spent denouncing the whole idea of classifying
human beings.

"These tests tell nothing/' he said. "People are individ
uals; they aren't bunches of attributes. You have to know
them with your Intuitions before you know them/'

The Wilsons left about midnight, and a few minutes
after they went out, Bunny stuck his head back through the
door:

"Max, I can't seem to start my car. I wonder if you know
anything about engines!"

Charlie jumped right out of his chair with delight

"There you are!" he exclaimed. "That shows you what
these tests are worth! Wilson the great machine operative
sixty dollars a week as a mechanic and he has to come
back and ask a poet to start his car!"

Just the same, Dr. Reitell knew a lot more about us when

GREAT COMPANIONS

he went home than he could have found out in months of
ordinary conversation. In particular, I thought, he had the
low-down on Charlie and me, and the reasons for our long
mutual understanding. Our "personality inventory"
showed a surprising number of traits in common. On
"emotional instability" Charlie made a score of 84 per cent
50 percent being the average, and 98 per cent indicating
a visit to the psychiatrist, at the very least.

"Your high score there," Dr. Reitell said in a kindly way,
"assures you of the ability to dramatize your public. You
overf eel for them their emotions. . . ."

He did not offer any such consoling reflections on my
still closer approach to the loony bin. My score was 87 per
cent.

The doctor's inventory attributed one trait to Charlie
that indubitably belongs to him, and makes him stand
out almost solitary among the weakly gregarious and
garrulous brain wasters of the movie world. That is a high
degree of "self-sufficiency."

"Your score of 77 per cent in this trait indicates," the
doctor announced, "that you prefer to be alone, rarely ask
for sympathy, and tend to ignore the advice of others."

The phrase is a picture of Charlie in Hollywood or
above it. It explains both the awe if the word is not too
strong and the resentment with which many of its more
convivial celebrities regarded him. It explains also the
dreadful state of mercy-turned-into-rage that girls would
get into when their almost universal impulse to become
his mother welcomed at a certain distance found the
inner citadel impregnable.

And not girls only. There is an impulse in all affection to

Charlie Chaplin sji

try to "get hold of* its object to make sure that he de
pends enough upon its warmth, to be there whenever a
returning warmth is needed. Charlie doesn't depend upon
any warmth that much not even when he is in love. He
is sufficient unto himself-

This trait frightens some people and gets them mad. It
gives me the pleasure of admiration. I do think, however,
that in the later years it grew on him and gave rise to flaws
in his work. Like most brooding artists, Charlie is hyper
sensitive, and gets very sad if you tell him something he has
just done is no good. Nevertheless, he always used to have
some robust critic around the studio, like Eddie Suther
land, a good director himself, who would say: "Aw, Char
lie, cut that gag short it's a bore!" Charlie would go into
a gloom, and maybe quit work for a day or two. But when
he emerged, he would emerge with a perfectly objective
and correct appraisal of the criticism.

I remember feeling that in two of his later pictures he
lacked that sort of corrective. He was indulging his touchi
ness. He was getting a taste for yes-men. It was a glaringly
obvious flaw in The Great Dictator that there was no build
up toward the momentous speech made by the little bar
ber at the end. The speech was crudely tacked on and,
however pleasing to our passions during those war years,
remains an addendum rather than a part of the picture.
All he had to do to correct that was to give the little man a
yen for speech-making put in one or two ludicrously un
successful attempts to grab an audience before the grand
chance comes. In matters of comedy or pathos Charlie is
just the one who knows this best. He was thrown off his
balance here, I think, by the weight of his feelings. A trifle

2g2 GREAT COMPANIONS

less indulgence of that admirable "self-sufficiency" might
have made both Modern Times and The Great Dictator
better even than they are. There is no man so great that he
cannot be helped.

In Charlie's inventory the score on "introversion" was
88 per cent so high that the doctor exclaimed with sur
prise: "You are not so damn far from being a recluse!
Seclusion from the world with solitude seems to be your
idea of heaven!" This again increased my respect for the
doctor's methods, for I had heard Charlie express that idea
of heaven many times. Years ago, when we both thought
some of the time, at least that a proletarian revolution
was coming, he remarked:

"It's all right with me. I'm for the working class. But
they needn't expect me on the barricades. I'm no hero
I've got too much imagination to be a hero. When the
shooting starts, I'm going to take a loaf of bread and a can
of sardines and beat it to the mountains."

He was climbing the mountains in a hurry while he said
that and then he climbed cautiously down again.

"I'll probably come back for a can opener, but that's all
111 ask of the revolution."

In those days, the general notion of living a hermit's life
was never far from his thoughts. His home at that time was
tucked away on a little walled-in hill with trees enclosing
its private sky.

"If I had a moat and a drawbridge," he said when he
showed it to me, "I could live here the year round all
alone and be happy. I might let you in once in a while for a
game of tennis, but only because I need exercise."

Another thing that vastly surprised our examiner was

Charlie Chaplin

Charlie's low score of 18 per cent on "dominance versus
submission."

"You certainly fooled me on this one," he said, "I had
always thought you would dominate others, but I find you
a very submissive, peaceful, quiet type indeed."

On "self-confidence** Charlie's score was still lower
only 1 1 per cent,

"You are very hamperingly self-conscious/' the doctor
decreed, "and harbor definite feelings of inferiority. Any
bold indications of aggressiveness, or strong assertions of
power, are but a defense, a thin veneer, the cloaking of a
timid, worried, and perturbed soul!"

Here I thought the doctor's system showed a serious
defect. It failed to distinguish dominance as an ultimate
fact from dominance as an immediate social attitude. It
failed to realize that shy and diffident people often have a
sovereign confidence in their own judgment, even if they
have to go home and lock themselves into a soundproof
chamber to find out which judgment is their own.

You could safely bet that, in any group engaged in mak
ing moving pictures, Chaplin, even though unknown,
would soon turn out to be the boss. He would either be
come the boss or get kicked out as unmanageable. And yet
you would see no clash of wills. He would never bristle or
try to domineer. He hated that kind of thing so much that
he evaded meeting one of our excessively red-blooded
writers who> on a visit to Hollywood, was entertained by
all the other stars.

**I like civilized people," he said.

It took this "submissive, quiet, peaceful type" only two
months, after arriving in Mack Sennett's studio in Holly-

234 GREAT COMPANIONS

wood in 1914, a young kid and a total greenhorn, to be
come the director of every picture he appeared in. It took
him less than six months to change the whole character
and conception of cinema comedy prevailing there, if not
everywhere. But there is no record of any "indications of
aggressiveness" or "strong assertions of power." On the con
trary, he bewildered everybody by behaving deferentially,
and even humbly, but just not doing what the director
told him to. Indeed, until the great news began to arrive
from the box offices, Charlie's independence on the set
was generally regarded as a special kind of stupidity. Mack
Sennett finally allowed him to direct a picture of his own
in sheer desperation.

"Let the damn fool find out for himself that it's not so
easy!"

But Charlie told me another story from those same days
which illustrates his self-distrust:

"Mack Sennett was paying me $175 a week, and when
the contract expired, Essenay offered me $3000 a week. I
went to Mack Sennett and told him I had had this offer. I
said that I would prefer to stay with him, if he would pay
me $1000 a week. He came back with an offer of a three-
year contract $500 a week the first year, $1000 the second,
and $3000 the third.

"I knew I was popular. I had seen the crowds in the
street outside the theatres, But I also knew how transitory
such popularity is. I had grown up in the shadow of the
uncertainties of an entertainer's career. I wanted to cash in
on my popularity before it ran dry. I said to Mack Sennett:

** Til accept your offer if you'll reverse it. Pay me $3000

Charlie ChapUn 235

a week the first year, $1000 a week the second, $500 a week
the third, and I'll stay/

"Sennett said it was an idiotic idea, and he wouldn't sign
such a contract. But I meant it. I was ready to sign/*

There is a shrewdness in such timidity, or near it, and
Charlie is extremely shrewd. As a businessman he fell down
only in matters demanding an adequate estimation of his
own size. It did not seem funny to him to make out his
income-tax reports on the theory that he and his half
brother, Syd, who also "acts in the pictures," were partners.
Even after paying up a million dollars in back taxes and
penalties, he could not quite follow the government's
logic!

Here is another example of his shrewdness or inferior
ity complex, I don't know which:

I came into his room one morning at the Waldorf As
toria, and found him still in bed. His face wore, or assumed
when he saw me, that expression of unutterable pathos that
so often and so suddenly breaks your heart on the screen*

"What's the matter, Charlie?" I asked, "Why are you so
sad?"

He reached over and picked up a slip of paper from the
bed table.

"Look at this!" he said.

I took the paper and read in the handwriting of his
valet-secretary:

"The X Company offers you $877,000 for twenty-
five fifteen-minute broadcasts."

I laughed. I thought his pathos was a joke. But it wasn't.

"I can't do it, you know," he said. And then, with in-

GREAT COMPANIONS

creased mournfulness: "I need the money too! The govern
ment just relieved me of a million dollars."

"Why can't you do it?** I said, "You can make a speech!"

"It isn't that/' he said. "You know how I love speech-

making. I can't come that close to my public. I have to

remain a little remote and mysterious. They have to

romanticize me. I would lose more than that at the box

office if I made myself real and familiar over the radio."

To me, I must say, Charlie remained a mystery no

matter how real and familiar he grew a baffling combina

tion of cool and high judgment, with total submersion in

blind emotional drives. He loved advice; he loved a long

conversation in which the best minds in the world would

devote themselves to his problems and feel that they were

guiding an untutored and yet great creative genius. He

loved it the way a duck loves a shower bath. The advice was

always thoughtfully weighed and, in so far as it was really

good, "accepted." Everybody went home with a feeling

that important and rather intimate decisions had been

made. But if they were made on the other side of the moon,

they would have had as much effect on Charlie's course of

action.

There seemed to be some almost weird disconnection
between his earnest judgments and his acts of will. He is
not more neurotic, I think, than most creative artists. They
do have to be easy of access to all currents of emotion the
doctor was perfectly right there. But Charlie makes less
effort to swim, less effort to keep his head above these
currents, than most thinking people. He not only never
acquired in childhood the habit of self-discipline, but
never apparently even caught on to the idea. It just doesn't

Charlie Chaplin 237

occur to him that he might stand up to a strong flow of
feeling, or even move against it for a time, because his
mind reminds him of something else. It doesn't occur to
him to feel sorry when he hasn't, I have never heard him
express regret, . . . But all of this applied only to his
relations with people. Toward his art he had in those days
at least conscience, integrity, discipline, patience, persist
ence, every good and great quality. Here again he had to be
understood as an untrained waif, a dream-endowed gamin,
a delicate-minded guttersnipe a leaf of paper with sacred
writings on it blown through the streets of a London slum.

You would understand him in that way if you knew him
long enough. And very respectfully also for he has great
dignity you would pity him a little, as you would his
namesake on the screen. His life, when I knew him, was
filled to the brim with what most lives consist of yeamiog
after wealth and fame and creative play and beautiful
women but he never knew how to enjoy any one of the
four.

His failure to revel in fame is, I suppose, a credit to hiia.
He is not only impatient of it, because he really loves to
wander in the streets alone, but he is distrustful of its
meaning. A person of his aristocratic tastes, if noble-bom,
might adore the masses and drink their adulation with
credulity. But Charlie knows them too well. He is, so far as
J can judge, sincerely and stubbornly unimpressed by num
bers. If he had a choice between world-wide popularity and
the praise of a few people whose judgment he respects, I
believe he would veer toward the latter with the simplic
ity of a compass.

One day when he had been up to Croton to see me, I

GREAT COMPANIONS

drove him to town in my open Ford car, a Model-T that
had seen better, and also more hushed and integrated days.
I pulled it up alongside a Childs restaurant near Broadway,
and we went in to have some griddle cakes and milk. Al
though we sat way back in the room, I became aware before
long that the big window was filling up with peering faces.
I watched Charlie with a curious interest, for to my more
omnivorous egotism this trait of his was hard to believe in.
He was at first smilingly annoyed. He got up and turned his
back to the window.

"In my business you have to erect fortifications before
you can enjoy a griddle cake," he said.

We finished quickly, and walked over to the car. . . .
I neglected to mention that that old Ford was responsive
to my every mood if I happened to feel slightly em
barrassed and in a hurry to get away, she never failed to
burn out a spark plug or kick loose a connection. We sat
there, painfully high up from the pavement, with the
crowd steadily augmenting, and the car spitting and jerk
ing in response to "Hello Charlie!" "Attaboy, Charlie!"
"Go to it, Charlie!" "Give her the gas, Charlie!" Charlie
bore up under it with apparent good nature. But when we
got away, he cursed that crowd with a venom that aston
ished me.

"I can't understand that," I said, "I should think you
would like their affection."

"It isn't affection, it's egotism," he said. "None of those
people cared a damn about me. If they did, they wouldn't
embarrass me. They were thinking about themselves, feel
ing bigger because they had seen me and could go and brag
about it."

Charlie Chaplin 239

After he cooled down, he told me how differently the
London crowds behaved.

"When I went down to the East End to visit my old
haunts/' he said, "word got round, and a regular mob
collected. But they always stayed as much as a hundred
feet away, kind of hushed and whispering to each other.
They never addressed me. They made me feel that I was
loved but not these New Yorkers. I know them!"

As usual, he had sensed an underlying truth and delved
it up, but it is a truth that most people would be willing to
leave buried for the sake of their own complacence. Mark
Twain had a similarly undeluded perception of men, but
it never marred his childlike joy in his own popularity.

Charlie's failure to get any fun out of his money was not
so healthy. It was more purely due to his deprived child
hood. He was so much more keenly aware of the enormous
expense of running a studio than of the infinitely more
enormous income from his pictures and securities that he
felt poor all the time. The whole fable of his sudden
fortune was beyond the grasp of this unhappy infant, and
his imagination got hold of the size of it only on the debit
side. Hence he took no pleasure in giving, no pleasure in
having, no pleasure in spending, money a misfortune that
kept him in touch, at least, with the common man!

Another thing that I thought Charlie did not know how
properly to enjoy was girls. Girls occupied almost as im
portant a place in his life as dollars, and they caused him
even more anxiety. It was not because there were more of
them. There honestly weren't so many. But girls unfortu
nately are not, like dollars, all just alike. They differ
fantastically. A susceptibility to their charms, therefore, is

24 GREAT COMPANIONS

not a steady and firm propulsion like the trade winds, in
relation to which a certain trend of character can be estab
lished and the hope cherished of really getting somewhere.
They are a permanent source of contrary breezes, fluctu
ating and sudden gusts, gales, billows, storms, typhoons and
hurricanes, which tear the character all to pieces. -

Anybody in a public position who tries with some force
and resolution to solve the problem of happiness in love
gets surrounded with a lot of scandal which has no relation
to any reality but the famished lusts of the scandalmongers.
Charlie, as I knew him, would not have been easy to live
with, not any easier than Lord Byron or a kaleidoscope. It
required, as I have shown, a large initial act of understand
ing to be, or continue to be, his friend. Some of his girl
friends had this understanding, and some hadn't. Some
hadn't any understanding at all. But they all went in with
their eyes open, and the opinion that there was something
abnormal or monstrously heartless in his behavior toward
women was an invention of the public, not a private fact.
The private fact that explains Charlie's early matrimonial
disasters is a very simple and very old one namely, that
love in people of poetic imagination is often blind, but if
these people also possess intellect, love opens its eyes after
a while, often quite suddenly, and sees the object of its
attachment.

I once asked Charlie about one of his celebrated loves
whom I had never met, and he answered:

"I thought she was divinely natural and real I found
she was only gawky and crude."

It was said in the manner of a person who has bought a
fountain pen at the five-and-ten-cent store, and thrown it

Charlie Chaplin 241

away when he looked it over. But that is the ruthlessness of
a mind with a taste for knowing, however late, the essential
truth. He did not need to tell me that the experience had
been, in its lifetime, tinged with Eternity, as they incurably
and always are.

There are few mismated wives who could not make a
monkey out of a man by dragging out in the divorce court
all the worst incidents they could remember and then
some. There are few mismated husbands who could not
reciprocate, if they chose to. We are discussing the ways in
which Charlie differed from others.

He was, to express it very simply, incurably romantic.
He was as susceptible to feminine charms as Tom Moore or
Robert Burns, and as given to lavish idealizations of the
vessel in which they dwelt. He had a veritable genius for
lyrical raptures about girls. At the same time, and deeper,
he had the need for a woman friend and companion a
companion not of his senses only, but his mind. The clas
sical approach, the approach of George to Martha Wash
ington, to take a remote example, itemizing her qualities
and status, and choosing her for a life companion on the
grounds of her fitness for the job, could never occur to
Charlie. He belongs to a different age and cult of living.
He could not mold his personal life as he molds a picture,
bringing its central problem to "the noetic mind" for
analysis. In real life he skipped that delectable phase alto
gether. It just wasn't in him at least when I knew him
to use his brains about women.

And the situation was complicated, if I am not mistaken,
by the fact that he knew this. He sensed the total process
before it began and watched it unfold with a sad, helpless,

242 GREAT COMPANIONS

abstract understanding that must have been very trying to
the victims of his adoration.

Charlie was In love, when very young and for a long time
after, with a beautiful girl named Hetty who played in the
theater where he first went on the stage. He came to
America he will admit in some moods because Hetty
was already booked to come. But he did not look her up
when she came. He just thought about her. He could not
believe she loved him he was not egotistical enough. He
let her slip out of his ken because of his diffidence so the
story goes. And when he went to London years after, still
conscious of Hetty, still cherishing a dim yet tender "per
haps" in his breast, he learned that she had died. He
brought home her photograph.

"It was nothing," he said when shyly showing me the
photograph. "She was a fetish. I knew nothing about girls
then." From which I inferred that Hetty was one of the
momentous things in his life.

Still, I have a hunch that excess of self-protection, as well
as lack of self-confidence, played its part in this sad story.
He knew that he loved Hetty too much. He knew even
then that she was a "fetish." He was afraid of her actual
self. He was afraid if he won the girl, he would lose the
romance.

And that hyperprudence, a kind of timorous canny cling
ing to what he's got, is the reason Charlie has not enjoyed
his creative art to the full, or exploited to the full his un
paralleled chance to enjoy it. His studio used to be as still
as a cemetery a good deal of the time. This was not because
he lacked energy or invention, or the funds, to fill it with a
riot of experimental miracles. He lacked freehearted

Charlie Chaplin 243

abandon. A good shot of generosity and recklessness
right into the blood stream would have made a big dif
ference.

If it is true, as Alexander Woollcott hazarded, that with
his one little mute creation on the screen, Charlie Chaplin
was "the foremost artist in the world," it is not extravagant
to say that, if he had gathered a great gang around him,
and let himself go, intellectually as well as poetically and
financially, forgetting the box office, casting loose from the
motion-picture industry altogether, he might have been
one of the foremost artists of history. He might have rivaled
Moliere and Aristophanes and had a good time besides.

How much this is Charlie's fault, and how much Holly
wood's or America's, or the twentieth century's I do not
not know. I only know that I have seen him do things
when discoursing about what might be done in the modern
cinema, if it were not for the "cost of production/' the
"ignorance of the public," the "risks of experimentation,"
the "censorship," or some other "if" that ought not per
manently to paralyze the foremost artist in the world,
which, if presented on the screen, would startle men's eyes,
and their minds too, as much as his first appearance did. He
has an audacity of invention and a versatility, or rather
universatility, in the pure art of acting, of which his screen
comedies conveyed no more than a hint.

I am afraid we are all implicated in this, Charlie, and
Hollywood, and the twentieth century, and America
above all, America. For Charlie Chaplin is essentially an
American humorist. Notwithstanding those early years in
London, where he struggled up out of poverty by learning
to tap dance and do an act, it was in the rough, democratic,

244 GREAT COMPANIONS

money-mad and sentimentally friendly atmosphere of an
American studio that he developed the art and imagined
the character that made him famous.

His not becoming an American citizen, about which so
much fuss has been made of late, was due to an indifference
to political institutions, not a preference for one or the
other. Had he been born in America and made his career
in England, he would not have bothered to become a
British subject. That is a fact which perhaps only artists
and anarchists can understand.

"Of course I am essentially American," he said to me one
day (and I wrote this down). "I feel American and I don't
feel British that's the chief thing/*

How he may feel now, I would not venture to guess. And
in our brief visit at Lausanne I was careful not to inquire.
The world is politically in such high tension these days that
old friends can hardly meet after a lapse of time without
rubber gloves on. I must say too, that I don't extend an un
gloved hand to the servants of the totalitarian powers,
whether fascist or communist. But I have known Charlie
too long and too well to place him in that category. He
is not a joiner, and he has neither the strength of character
nor the firmness of conviction to serve a conspiracy. He is,
or is apt to be, in a general way, "for the underdog." And
he has gulped down as gospel for what reason I do not
know a major portion of the lies manufactured in Mos
cow to prove that the ruthless new exploiting class of
opulent bureaucrats in the Kremlin are, or represent, that
underdog. He used to be more astute than that. Indeed, in
the old Hollywood days, it was I who was the dupe not,
to be sure of Stalinism, but of Lenin-and-Trotskyism and

Charlie Chaplin 245

he was the wary skeptic. But in 1947, meeting accidentally
in the streets of New York, we dined together, and I found
him as innocent of the facts of recent political life, as
though he had just been born. I tried for a time to stem
the stream of cold-war cliches that Charlie poured out, but
gave up when he declared that his persecution* in the
notorious paternity suit had been due to the fact that
America was going fascist and he had attacked Hitler in
his film, The Great Dictator!

"If that's really your opinion," I said, "let's not try to
talk politics because to my mind it's crazy."

He agreed and we spent the evening in reminiscence and
philosophic discussion. So this accommodation had already
been reached when I came to Lausanne, and I did not feel
obliged to take Charlie's flirtations with the Chou En Lais
too seriously. My feeling about that and the feeling, I
think, of essential America was delicately expressed in
a New York Times editorial of June 5, 1954, when he
accepted the "peace prize" of the Communist-sponsored
World Peace Council.

If he knew more about Russia, or if he were perhaps less
bitter, Charlie Chaplin would be well aware that the
"peace prize" is not a peace prize at all, but a prize offered
to those who serve the purposes of a brutal and tyrannical
imperialism. Charlie Chaplin once stated that his ideology
was a sympathy for "the little man his right to have a

* That it was persecution was well known to me because a friend of mine
spent with the girl involved the night on which she is supposed to have
slept with Charlie and become the mother of his baby. At the first hint of
a trial, my friend left town in a hurry to avoid having to state the fact in
court.

GREAT COMPANIONS

roof over his head and to work and raise a family." He
should know, but we hope he does not, that the little man
who moves so touchingly, so humorously, with such pure
genius, through most of the Chaplin films could not sur
vive and prosper in today's Russia. . . .

He has allowed himself to be used by a sinister con
spiracy of which the little man he so touchingly repre
sented is the victim. The little man he once portrayed and
with whom he has now parted company will some day be
at home in the world and untroubled. Perhaps the memory
or revival of the early Chaplin films will help the little
man in his struggle for freedom. But Charlie Chaplin,
whether he knows it or not, has gone in the other direc
tion. He shuffles off leftward, toward Moscow, perhaps not
even realizing where he is going, most probably not call
ing himself a Communist or a fellow traveler but there
he goes and the sag of his back, the flap of his coattails, the
set of the little derby over his ears and the sadly reminis
cent twirling of his cane move us almost to tears.*

Almost as distressing as Charlie's break with the "little
man" he created, was the unseemly behavior toward him
of the United States government when he went abroad in
1953. The Department of Justice, finding no ground for
legal investigation or action against him while he was
resident here, turned over to the Department of Immigra
tion the job of holding him up when he should apply for
re-entry. I had the pleasure of telling an Immigration agent
who came to me seeking data for the case, some of my feel
ings about this sly manuever. To wait until a man leaves

* It is worth mentioning that Charlie gave the Stalin Peace Prize money to
Abbe* Pierre, "the rag-picker of Paris," to distribute among the poor.

Charlie Chaplin 247

home on a visit any man, least of all a great and beloved
artist and then slam the door and say, "Now see if you
can get back in!" struck me as beneath the dignity of the
American government. It was flagrantly unrepresentative
of the American people.

Inexcusable as it was, however and the moralistic
clamor against Charlie among certain scandal-addicts,
really hysterical this did not justify him in stepping down
from the heights he occupied and composing vengeful
propaganda. In France last year I saw his film, A King in
New York,, and found it, but for one or two spontaneous
laughs at traits of American life that we all ridicule while
participating in them, so dull and contrived as to suggest
that his whole heart was not in it. I think the last twenty
minutes of Limelight, the union there of utterly hilarious
comedy not with pathos, for that has been done before
but with the ultimate tragedy of death itself, stands high
among the greatest achievements of dramatic art. I would
like to hold him to those heights. I don't want him to be
American or anti-American. I want him to belong, as he
once did, to truth and the human race.

John Dewey:
My Teacher and Friend

s,

"ince this memoir takes the form of a story of Dewey's
life rather than of my meetings with him, it may be well
to describe our association in general terms. I studied
under him at Columbia for three years, teaching logic
under his supervision and occupying an office next to his
with the door usually open between us. For the first of
those years I dined at his home every Sunday, and we spent
the afternoon and often the evening conversing together.
For another year I served by his appointment as his as
sistant in philosophy. I helped him revise the English and
improve the expression of his thoughts in his chapters of
the book on ethics which he wrote in collaboration with
Professor Tufts. I attended his course of lectures on Logical

250 GREAT COMPANIONS

Theory and another on modern Philosophy. I submitted
to him my Ph.D. thesis, "The Quality of Plato/' and we
discussed it more than once the last time in 1940! And
then finally, I interviewed him three or four times, a
notebook in my hand, with a view to writing this portrait
of him and of the development of his ideas. His daughter
and collaborator, Evelyn, read the manuscript and helped
me with comments and suggestions, but Dewey himself
never examined it. Nothing could be farther from an "offi
cial" biography, but any remarks I attribute to him were
put down immediately in my notebook and are quoted
verbatim.

Dewey had passed his eighty-second year when I under
took this engaging task, but there was not a quaver in his
voice or a quiver in his handwriting. Up in Nova Scotia,
where he went in summer, he still kept the local people in
a dither by swimming in all weathers in the deeps of Solar
Lake. Besides surviving this himself, he surprised them one
morning by going out an extra two hundred feet and
rescuing, in a deferential way, a drowning woman. At his
occasional cocktail parties on Central Park West, which
were attended by a motley aggregation of all ages, faiths,
colors, and social positions, from grandmothers of Ethical
Culture to prophets of the ultimate wrinkle in modern
painting, he always seemed the most agile person present
agile in pretending to remember who they all were, agile
in sliding around among them with the drinks.

John Dewey may best be described as the man who saved
our children from dying of boredom, as we almost did in
school. The Encyclopaedia Britannica in its article on
Education puts it less succinctly: "By 1900 the center of

John Dewey: My Teacher and Friend 251

gravity had shifted from the subject-matter of instruction
to the child to be taught. The school, in consequence, had
begun to change from a place where children prepare for
life. ... to a place where children live. . . . These
changes, largely due to the teachings of John Dewey, have
become dominant purposes of the American elementary
school of the twentieth century." That is half of who John
Dewey was, and the other half was a philosopher in the
technical sense a man who made his living arguing about
such questions as "How We Think" and "What Does
Thought Do to Being?"

The University of Paris, in conferring a degree upon
him in 1930, described him as "the most profound and
complete expression of American genius." And not so long
ago, Waldo Frank called him "the most influential
American."

Two things made this grade-A brand of fame surprising.
One was Dewey's perverse and obdurate neglect of it. He
never blew his own horn and never listened when kind
friends undertook to blow it for him. He did not attend
the banquet given in his honor on his eightieth birthday,
although some of the world's most distinguished citizens
were there. He found he had a previous engagement at his
daughter Evelyn's cattle ranch in the northwest comer of
Missouri. The whole thing had been done once before
when he was seventy.

"I just can't stand it again," he told Evelyn.

The other thing that made Dewey's fame surprising was
the total lack of fireworks in his nature. He published
40 books and 815 articles and pamphlets a pile 12 feet 7
inches high but if he ever wrote one "quotable" sentence

252 GREAT COMPANIONS

it got permanently lost in the pile. Not only was his own
style dull, but this dullness infected everybody who had
anything to say about his theories of education. A reform
which might be described as a grown-up formulation of the
necessity, long known to lively-minded children, of raising
hell in school, was put over in the language of the prosiest
of disciplinary pedagogues. No flash of wit or poetry illu
mines it.

Perhaps Dewey's origin had something to do with this.
He was born, like Calvin Coolidge, in Vermont, and he was
born with the same trick of concealing whatever was, or
was not, going on in his head under a noncommittal ex
terior. Vermonters have a dry humor of understatement
an understatement so remote that you can't quite guess
whether they are joking or just failing to warm up. So it is
just possible that Dewey concealed the dynamite of his
educational theories in a pile of dry hay merely to amuse
himself.

His father was famous in a small way as a joker. He
"kept store" in Burlington, a town of ten or twelve
thousand, and sold more goods than anybody else in town
because of the whimsical way he went at it. A sign outside
reading "Hams and Cigars Smoked and Unsmoked" ap
prised his customers that they would not be taken too
seriously. On a frequently borrowed wheelbarrow he
painted in big red letters: "Stolen from A. S. Dewey."
Notwithstanding his popularity, A. S. Dewey never got
along very well because it hurt his feelings to ask people to
pay their bills. He stuttered, too, and that made it seem an
especially good joke when he asked for money.

Mrs. A. S. Dewey Archibald Sprague is the name was

John Dewey: My Teacher and Friend 253

the daughter of "Squire Rich" o Richville, and her grand
father had been in Congress. But the Riches hadn't gotten
along very well in a property sense, either, and John's boy
hood home was run on lines of watchful thrift. If he wanted
any spending money he had to earn it which he did, as be
fitted a complete expression of American genius, by deliver
ing papers after school. That netted him a dollar a week,
and in the summer when he reached fourteen, he got a real
job "tallying" in a lumber yard, which netted him six
dollars. He had to do chores around the house besides, and
got punished when he chiseled with an appeal to con
science, which he found more painful than a licking.

His parents belonged to the White Street Congrega
tional Church, the father being religious mostly for the
reason that it wouldn't have occurred to him not to be, the
mother putting a little more feeling into it. She had been
brought up a Universalist, which means one of fifty to
sixty thousand Christians kindhearted enough to believe
we shall all be saved a far cry from Calvin's doctrine of
the Elect of God which did so much to keep New England
mean and snobbish. She had attended revivals in her youth,
and was, to quote her son's exact language, "not emotion
ally repressed and not austere, but pretty moralistic." Read
ing dime novels and playing marbles for keeps were
immoral, but dancing and card playing were not. John was
an excellent whist player and he would, in my opinion,
have shone still more brilliantly at poker but not so
bright a light, it seems, on the dance floor.

There was something painfully, or if you will, divinely
average in John Dewey's early life and circumstances. He
swam and skated on Lake Champlain, but not any too well.

254 GREAT COMPANIONS

He liked to play, but was no good at "set games" not com
petitive enough, I think. He was a great reader, but did not
care for "set lessons," either. He worked fairly hard during
school hours, but only because he didn't want to carry his
textbooks home. There were books in the village library
that he liked better. He went through grammar and high
school fast, but without getting high marks. People were
more impressed with his sweet temper and selflessness than
his brains.

Dewey thought he probably would not have gone to
college if there hadn't been a college right there in Burling
ton to slide into. As it was, he slid into Vermont University
at the early age of fifteen an unusual accomplishment, but
one which caused no particular comment, least of all from
him. He slid through his first three college years also with
out throwing off any sparks, or giving grounds to predict
anything about his future except that he was not going to
be a mechanic to convince yourself of which you only had
to watch him try to drive a nail. He joined the church dur
ing his sophomore year, and did so with sincere religious
feeling, but with no profound experience of conversion.
He was a good boy, and wanted to be better, and thought
God would help him and that was all.

He wanted to be better, however, with the inward glow
of a boy whose sexual life is almost entirely sublimated.
He was shy too far inside of himself even to think of
making love to a girl.

"I tried to work up a little affair with my cousin when I
was nineteen," he told me. "I thought something ought
to be done. But I couldn't do it. I was too bashful. I was
abnormally bashful."

John Dewey: My Teacher and Friend 255

This fact, combined with the moralistic inculcations of
his mother, enabled John Dewey to make his start in life as
an impeccable Sunday-school teacher. He mildly ques
tioned some of the dogmas of the White Street religion; he
was pained one Sunday when in the midst of prayer the
question rose up in his mind: "Isn't this, after all, just a
routine performance?" That question bothered him a good
deal and a long time. But he never had any doubt about the
supreme importance of "being good," and helped along by
bashfulness, he managed not only to teach it but achieve it.

It was toward the end of his junior year that this placid
process of development was crashed into by an event that
unsettled the whole scheme, and may be described as the
chief crisis or turning point of John Dewey's life. It would
not have been a crisis in your life or mine, but we also did
not get a degree from the University of Paris as the most
profound expression of American genius. The crisis was a
short course in physiology with a textbook written by
Thomas Henry Huxley. That accidental contact with
Darwin's brilliant disciple, then waging his fierce war for
evolution against the "impregnable rock" of Holy Scrip
ture, woke John Dewey up to the spectacular excitement
of the effort to understand the world. It woke him with a
shock, for in reading Huxley's objective explanation of the
working of man's body and brain, Dewey felt himself to be
in a different world altogether from that in which as a
White Street Sunday-school teacher he was telling boys'
souls to be good. He found Huxley's world exciting; he
was swept off his feet by the rapture of scientific knowledge.
And yet the old moralistic attitude had too much momen
tum to give way. He could not abandon thinking about

256 GREAT COMPANIONS

human life as a thing to be shaped by moral will and medi
tation; and yet he could not deny the validity of Huxley's
account of how material forces shaped it. There seemed to
be some separation, some gap, some intimately ominous
chasm here, over which this lanky, mild, shy, black-eyed
boy yearned in the intense way that most boys do over the
yawning gulf that separates them from the body of their
best girl.

As a result, his senior year at college was an ardent effort
and adventure. He plunged heart and soul into his studies.
He read and labored far into the night. He led his class
and got the highest marks on record in philosophy. At
times he seemed to his classmates, when answering a ques
tion, to be somewhat diffidently explaining the lesson to-
the professor. By the time that year was over, there was
very little hope left in the Dewey family that John would
turn out to be anything more useful than a philosopher.
The question was; what are you going to do with a nine
teen-year-old philosopher? And to this, nobody in that
small farming community, John perhaps least of all, had
any practical answer.

As a temporary solution John went down to Oil City r
Pennsylvania, and taught in a high school run by a female
cousin. He earned forty dollars a month. Two brokers liv
ing in the same boarding house urged him to borrow some
more money and invest it in the town's newest excitement,.
Standard Oil. Instead, he borrowed books and used the
oil in a lamp.

One evening while he sat reading he had what he called
a "mystic experience." It was an answer to that question
which still worried him: whether he really meant business

John Dewey: My Teacher and Friend 257

when he prayed. It was not a very dramatic mystic experi
ence. There was no vision, not even a definable emotion
just a supremely blissful feeling that his worries were over.
Mystic experiences in general, Dewey explained, are purely
emotional and cannot be conveyed in words. But when he
tried to convey his in words, it came out like this:

"What the hell are you worrying about, anyway? Every
thing that's here is here, and you can just lie back on it."

'Tve never had any doubts since then," he added, " nor
any beliefs. To me faith means not worrying/'

Although his religion had so little affirmative content
and had nothing to do, he was sure, with his philosophy
Dewey likened it to the poetic pantheism of Wordsworth,
whom he was reading at that time, and to Walt Whitman's
sense of oneness with the universe. To forestall your own
remark, he would remind you that it was very likely a sub
limation of sex, and point out that this didn't make it any
less normal or important.

"I claim I've got religion," he said, "and that I got it
that night in Oil City."

At the end of the year Dewey's cousin resigned her job,
and his went with it. He found himself back in Burlington
with a new tranquillity in his heart, but still the old ten
sion in his head about that chasm that he saw yawning
between the material and moral sciences. To close that
chasm always seemed the big problem to John Dewey; he
said once that he had devoted his entire intellectual life
to its solution. It was not, however, a problem that any
body in Burlington was just then offering money to have
solved. To keep going while he worked on it, he took
another job, this time teaching in the little district school-

258 GREAT COMPANIONS

house in Charlotte, Vermont. Charlotte is not far from
Burlington, and while teaching everything from the alpha
bet to plane geometry, Dewey devoted his spare hours,
under the direction of his old philosophy professor,
H. A. P. Tony, who made a free gift of his time and knowl
edge, to reading the philosophical classics. He also started
writing a little philosophy on his own.

In 1879, when John Dewey set out on his life task of
reconciling ethics with physiology, there was hardly such a
thing as a career in philosophy in America. The whole
country was little better in that respect than Burlington,
Vermont. Professors of philosophy were ministers of the
gospel who for some reason, located as often in their vocal
organs as their brains, had found it easier to teach than
preach. They were a sort of plain-clothes chaplain em
ployed by the colleges to see that science did not run away
with the pupils' minds. One of the few exceptions was
W. T. Harris, who published a Journal of Speculative Phi
losophy in St. Louis, Missouri. Harris was what they called
a "lay philosopher," and Dewey, although still a church
goer, was "lay" enough to send his first original work to
Harris. It was a little piece he tossed off after school hours
in Charlotte on "The Metaphysical Assumptions of
Materialism." He hardly offered it as a contribution to the
journal; he merely inquired of Harris whether it showed
signs of promise. When it was accepted for publication, he
decided that he would become a lay philosopher too. There
would be a career for one, he guessed, by the time he got
ready to have it. He also guessed that it was not necessary
for an American who wanted a philosophical education to

John Dewey: My Teacher and Friend 259

study in Germany. That sounds obvious now, but in those
days it was a revolution.

An imaginative merchant named Johns Hopkins had
just founded a new kind of research university in Balti
more, and Dewey's annunciation angel, Professor Huxley,
had delivered the inaugural address. The new university
was offering twenty-five-hundred-dollar fellowships to be
competed for by college graduates. Dewey tried for one
and failed. (Thorstein Veblen also tried for one and failed.)
But Dewey had an aunt with five hundred dollars, and
he borrowed that and went to Johns Hopkins, anyway.
After studying a year, he tried for the fellowship again and
got it. He also got a job teaching the history of philosophy
to undergraduates. So who said there wasn't a career in
philosophy in America? To be sure, there was no pay
attached to this job, but then, on the other hand, he did
not have to pay for the privilege of doing it. He was happy.
He had found a wonderful teacher, a Hegelian named
George Sylvester Morris. His brainy big brother, Davis R.
an economist, who had a longer section in Who's Who
than John had came down to live and study with him.
He had no sex problems. And he was falling in love with
Hegel.

Unless you understood how exciting it is to fall in love
with Hegel and what hard work there was very little
Dewey could tell you about those three years at Johns
Hopkins. They were entirely filled up, from morning to
midnight, with philosophy. And philosophy is a large
thing, not easy to define. It is generally assumed to be an
effort to go behind the returns made by science. Science

GREAT COMPANIONS

tells us how things are like each other, and how they follow
each other in certain sequences; but why there should be
any things at all, or any telling about them, science can
not decide. Neither can philosophy really, and the phi
losophers who say so, the skeptics, are the ones who give us
a feeling of profound truthfulness. What the others do, for
the most part, is to think up ways of mitigating the rather
desolate conception of things arrived at by science. A very
large part of Western European philosophy is, in fact, an
effort to read God back into the universe as fast as science
crowds him out. Even when you get it out of the hands of
the clergymen, metaphysics is still largely, as Feuerbach
remarked, a "disguised theology."

And Hegel invented a most ingenious disguise, a truly
wondrous scheme for keeping deity in the world, no matter
how harsh, fickle, bloody and reckless of ideal interests the
world turns out to be when honestly examined. His scheme
was, in brief, to say that all reality, good and bad together,
is the Divine Spirit in a process of inward, and also onward
and upward, struggle toward the realization of its own free
and complete being. Many years before natural scientists
began to see the world as in process of evolution, Hegel
was ready for them with his theory that God himself is a
world in process of evolution. Nothing more prodigiously
ingenious was ever invented by the mind of man than this
Hegelian scheme for defending soulfulness against science.
Only it takes a very hard-working soul to get the hang of
it. ...

That much of a technical nature is necessary if you want
to know John Dewey's life story. He belonged to the
White Street Congregational Church in Burlington; he

John Dewey: My Teacher and Friend 261

was brought up by an evangelical and "pretty moralistic"
mother; and he was aroused to philosophic speculation by
Thomas Henry Huxley, the "prophet of science," the man
who in order to describe his skeptical attitude toward deity,
invented one day, in consultation with his wife, the word
"agnostic."

It was not deity, however, that Dewey was worried about
after he read Huxley; it was not religion that he felt con
cerned as a young philosopher to defend. His discovery
that the real world is arranged somewhat differently from
the plans presented in the White Street Sunday School had
upset him pretty badly; he described it to me as a "trying
personal crisis." But that crisis, so far as concerns religion,
seems to have been passed through and a working adjust
ment arrived at before he came to Huxley. I do not mean
that he had rejected religion, or denied all meaning, as
Huxley did, to the word God. But he had rejected the
more incredible parts of religion as expounded on White
Street, and had ceased to regard what was left as a thing to
reason about. He had decided, to put it in his own words,
that "any genuinely sound religious experience could and
should adapt itself to whatever beliefs one found oneself
intellectually entitled to hold."

That poised and unexcitable attitude toward God
keeping him, so to speak, waiting in the anteroom while
you interview the world was characteristic of John
Dewey. As an example of social behavior, I don't know but
it is characteristic of Vermont. It has not appeared else
where in history, so far as I know, and is basic to an under
standing of this very American philosopher. It was not God
but man that Dewey was worried about. He saw that by

262 GREAT COMPANIONS

comparison with the hard implacable body of fact pre
sented by Huxley, there was something soft and unconvinc
ing about Christian ethics about the whole "spiritual"
way o discussing human problems. It contained too many
pious wishes, too much that could not be verified. He
wanted to make it hard and sure and solid. To put it in his
own words to me: "I was reacting against the too moralistic
morals in which I had been brought up, and trying to find
something that would be more objective, more like phys
ical science. In more technical terms, the problem I was at
work on, and have been all my life, is whether there is any
common method applicable both to the material and the
human sciences."

That was the problem that Dewey thought he had solved
by believing in Hegel's idealistic metaphysics. And the
solution was, roughly speaking, to subordinate the material
sciences, or bring them in under the "human," by asserting
that materialness is an illusion. Properly understood the
whole world behaves like a mind. That Professor Morris,
who led him into this philosophy, was a man of rare moral
character, a man as good if not as "moralistic" as his
mother, was not accidental. "I have never known," Dewey
says, "a more single-hearted and whole-souled man."

Here then is this "most complete expression of American
genius" caught fast at the age of twenty-two in a completely
German system of metaphysics. It sounds like a misfortune,
and perhaps on a long-time estimate of John Dewey it will
prove to have been one. But to him, for the time being at
least, it was a tranquilizing experience as blissfully tran-
quilizing to his mind as the Oil City "conversion" had been
to his heart. Sixty years later, when the whole thing

John Deivey: My Teacher and Friend 263

seemed to him a sentimental German self-deception, he
still felt a pious love toward Hegel, and groped for words
that might express the emotion of release that this mystical
conception of the cosmos gave him. Some "sense of sepa
ration," some "dividedness," or "loneliness," as though the
world were cut off from his soul, or he himself were cut
off from the world, had troubled him. He had been in
painful tension. Hegel's metaphysics gave him back the
sense "of unity, of things flowing together."

If Dewey had not been such a hopeless extrovert, we
might have a little more light on this philosophical
romance or if he had been sick and gone to a psycho
analyst. But he remained perfectly healthy, and couldn't
quite remember what it was all about.

"I was unduly bashful and self-conscious," he said, "al
ways putting myself over against other people. Perhaps
that was it. Or perhaps an overemphasis on evangelical
morals had given me a feeling of alienation from the world.
I can't recover it. If I could, I could write something
about adolescence that really would be interesting."

Whatever the cause, the effect was long-lasting. It was
in 1881, his first year at Johns Hopkins, that Dewey was
rapt away by Hegel, and he remained pretty Hegelian for
ten or twelve years, coming back to earth, appropriately
enough, in the vicinity of Chicago in the early nineties. It
is unusual for a Hegelian to recover at thirty-five. If they
stay up that long, they generally get lost in the strato
sphere. And it is safe to say that one of the main factors in
bringing Dewey down was a flesh-and-blood romance a
romance with a girl who had her feet very firmly planted
on the earth.

264 GREAT COMPANIONS

When Dewey took his Ph.D. at Johns Hopkins, President
Oilman offered him a loan to continue his studies in Ger
many. Dewey was deeply gratified, but said that he would
rather not borrow money, and felt perfectly at home in
America. President Gilman also offered him some advice:
"Don't be so bookish; don't live such a secluded life; get
out and see people/' That offer Dewey was more inclined
to accept, although he did not know exactly how to act
upon it. What he needed first was a job, and he spent an
other rather wistful summer in Burlington before he got
one. It was a nine-hundred-dollar job as instructor in phi
losophy at the University of Michigan, where his friend
Morris was teaching.

In Michigan Dewey began to "see people," and among
the first he saw was a coed named Alice Chipman, who
lived in the same boarding house with him. She was a
strong-minded girl, descended from a family of radicals
and freethinkers, an ardent woman suffragist, deeply re
ligious but of no church, and brilliantly intolerant of
"bunk/* She was shorter than Dewey and thicker, not
beautiful and not well dressed. By a purely physiological
accident her eyelids hung so low over her eyes that to a
timid judgment she looked forbidding. But her features
were handsome in a strong way, and her mouth was gentle.
Her pioneer grandfather had joined the Chippewa tribe of
Indians and fought for their rights; he had also opposed
Lincoln and the Civil War. She inherited his crusading
spirit and his moral courage. And she had a passionate
interest in the life of ideas. It was good luck or was it
good sense? that John Dewey fell in love with such a
woman. An adoring sissy might have left him half of what

John Dewey: My Teacher and Friend 265

he did become. That does not say, however, that their re
lation was uneven. Dewey also was strong-minded. In his
mild and limp way, with neither inward conflict nor out
ward fuss, he would stick to his own course of action,
barring rational arguments to the contrary, with the mo
mentum of a mule. Besides that, he had the advantage of
superior knowledge; Alice was a pupil in his classes. There
was, in short, a full-sized moral and intellectual admira
tion between them. "No two people/' Dewey remarked to
me, "were ever more in love."

They were married at the home of the Chippewa Cop
perhead in 1886. In the same year Dewey was made assist
ant professor, and his salary was raised to sixteen hundred
dollars. The next year their first child, Fred, was born,
and Dewey published his first book significantly not a
philosophy book at all, but a textbook in psychology.
Dewey was willing to see psychology break loose from
philosophy and become a natural science, and this book
places him among the pioneers of that process. But still it
winds up with a piously Hegelian reminder, quaint in a
scientific textbook now, that the ultimate reality is God.

The next year, without any wangling on his part, Dewey
was given a professorship at the University of Minnesota
and a salary of twenty-five hundred dollars. The year after
that, his friend Professor Morris having died, he returned
to Michigan to succeed him as professor and head of the
department of philosophy, with a salary of three thousand
dollars. Dewey had guessed right about careers for "lay
philosophers." They were growing on the bushes espe
cially for those who could still weave God into a textbook
of psychology.

266 GREAT COMPANIONS

By the time he came back to Michigan in 1889, how
ever, Dewey was losing interest in Hegel's world made out
of Spirit. The social atmosphere of the Midwest in those
years, when population was spreading like wildfire, was
hardly one to sustain a faith in mystic systems that made
real estate unreal. Moreover, John and Alice were both
fascinated by concrete human problems connected with
the novelty of a democratic state university. Under James
B. Angell, whom all who taught for him regarded as the
ideal college president, the university was the active head
of the public-school system of Michigan.

One of Dewey's tasks as a member of its faculty was to
visit high schools throughout the state, and investigate
their qualifications to send up students to the university.
This first set his mind to work on that general problem of
Democracy and Education which was to be the title of his
major work in this field. It also took his mind off the
Hegelian cosmos. He still formally believed that Hegel had
correctly described the logical structure of Reality with a
large R. But he was getting more interested in what he
called the "instrumental logic" by which people who are
real with a little r think out ways of getting what they
want. This tendency was vastly reinforced by the appears
ance in 1890 of William James' famous Psychology, which
foreshadowed the philosophy of pragmatism, formulated
by its author seventeen years later. In 1891 Dewey an
nounced a book called "Instrumental Logic," but he then
still meant by the phrase: what logic is like when it is used
as an instrument. He never wrote the book, and before
the end of the century he was teaching that logic is an in-

John Dewey: My Teacher and Friend 267

strument, and that is all there is to it. The Hegelian cos
mos, as he put it, "just dropped away."

Before that happened, however, Dewey's own personal
place in the cosmos had taken a large upward leap. The
University of Chicago had been founded with a plentiful
endowment by John D. Rockefeller, and its president,
William Rainey Harper, had conceived the novel idea of
combining the departments of philosophy, psychology, and
education into one. In 1894 Dewey was invited to come to
Chicago at a salary of five thousand dollars and be the head
of the whole thing. It was a piece of rare good luck, for
Dewey's philosophy was taking more and more the aspect
of a psychology of the thought process, and his interest in
education was running neck and neck with his interest in
philosophy. Moreover, the Dewey family was growing and
was destined to grow far beyond the limits set by the in
come of any ordinary lay philosopher. Mrs. Dewey, not
withstanding her free-thinking grandparents, held some
streak of puritanism that made her think it wicked to de
cide when and under what conditions you are going to
bear children. The second child, Evelyn, had been born
in 1890, and the third, Morris named after Dewey's
revered teacher early in 1893. The difference between
three and five thousand dollars was beginning to look im
portant, and the letter from Chicago was in all ways a
joyful piece of news.

Mrs. Dewey, they decided, would spend the summer in
Europe with the children, and Dewey would go ahead to
Chicago and earn some extra money teaching in the sum
mer school. Dewey hated to say good-bye to his two-year-

268 GREAT COMPANIONS

old baby, Morris, for he had already made up his mind, by
what signs it would be hard to say, that the child was a
kind of saintly genius. This was not all a parent's fond
ness, either. A stranger on the boat going over made the
peculiar remark: "If that child lives long enough there
will be a new religion." Morris died of diphtheria in
Milan, and fifty years later Dewey could not mention the
event without a catch in his throat.

Three other children were born in Chicago Lucy,
Gordon, and Jane and thus there were still five of them
rioting around the house during the best years of this
philosopher's life. They did not disturb his meditations
in the least. As a logician Dewey was at his best with one
child climbing up his pants leg and another fishing in his
inkwell. He had not only mental concentration but a way
of doing two things at once that was at times almost alarm
ing. Friends were known to follow him several blocks
down the street to make sure he would negotiate the cross
ings, he seemed so unaware of where his body was going.

I don't know whether this belongs in the same category
of facts, but one sunny afternoon John Dewey and four of
his colleagues on Morningside Heights walked a half mile
down Broadway to attend an open-air movie "none of us
realizing until we got there/' as Thomas Reed Powell re
called, "that movies require darkness, which in this part of
the world is not rampant in the daytime."

In his New York apartment Dewey used to do his medi
tating with a telephone beside his ear. He found that it
only took a minute to dispose of an inquiry from the land
lord about washing the windows, a request for a consulta
tion from the Chinese ambassador, a question from Sidney

John Dewey: My Teacher and Friend 269

Hook about the policies of the Committee for Cultural
Freedom, a summons to a meeting in honor of the old
rebel, Angelica Balabanoff, a plea for a "moral affidavit"
for some obscure refugee, an invitation to address a World
Congress of Sciences in Cambridge. In one second after he
hung up the receiver, the old typewriter would be jump
ing along finishing his interrupted thought.

Dewey never bothered about physical exercise; brain
work, he thought, was just as good, if there was enough
of it. So for recreation he would go on long automobile
rides, and sit in the front seat solving crossword puzzles
and conversing with his companions a slightly irritating
habit that was not made any more agreeable when, at the
end of the journey, he turned out to have a more accurate
memory of the landscape than they had.

To such a mind a half-dozen or so children would ob
viously be a help philosophically. But Dewey's children,
besides clambering on his philosophy in a helpful way
while he was writing it, made another contribution more
important to the course of history. They kept the prob
lems of philosophy thoroughly mixed up in his mind with
the problems of education.

It is customary to regard Dewey's educational theories
as an inference from his instrumental philosophy, but more
accurately they are an inference from his children. Dewey
was interested in reforming education and wrote a book
about it long before he became an instrumental philos
opher. The book was called Applied Psychology, and that
indicates what his doctrine about education is. Education
is life itself, so long as the living thing continues to grow;
education is growth under favorable conditions; the school

270 GREAT COMPANIONS

is a place where those conditions should be regulated
scientifically. That is about all there is to it.

The household also needed a little renovation along this
line, and Dewey's influence on the relations between par
ents and their children has been as great as his influence
on the schools. It was a reform that in the nature of the
case began at home.

Once Sabino, the boy he adopted in later years, ran away
from a boarding school in the country. The principal re
ported it to Dewey by long-distance telephone, and con
cluded:

"As soon you find him send him right back and well see
that it doesn't happen again."

Dewey said: "Well, I rather think on the whole that if
Sabino decided to leave the school, he probably used his
judgment about it, and he may very likely be right."

In his house at Ann Arbor, Dewey's study was directly
under the bathroom, and he was sitting there one day, ab
sorbed in a new theory of arithmetic, when suddenly he
felt a stream of water trickling down his back. He jumped
out of his chair and rushed upstairs to find the bathtub
occupied by a fleet of sailboats, the water brimming over,
and his small boy Fred busy with both hands shutting it off.
The child turned as he opened the door, and said severely:

"Don't argue, John get the mop!"

You might think that a family of five children, brought
up along these lines, would be something of a riot, and
they did have a rare good time. But they were, as children
go, a remarkably well mannered bunch of rioters. They
were at times, indeed, a little too well mannered. Jane used
at the age of twelve to discuss the causes of prostitution

John Dewey: My Teacher and Friend 271

in a disturbingly judicious manner. And Evelyn developed
so early the poised and sagely humorous good sense which
surrounds her now with loving friends that you wished
sometimes she would be a little foolish for a minute.

Both as philosopher and educator, John Dewey reached
his high point in Chicago. In a book called Studies in
Logical Theory, published in 1903, he formulated that
very American philosophy which was left in his head
after Hegel's German cosmos "dropped away/' All think
ing, it declares even HegeFs about his cosmos is in
strumental, and basically concerned with bringing human
beings to their ends. Dewey finds rest in this idea because
it closes, in a way that does less violence to common-sense
reality than Hegel did, that chasm which he had felt yawn
ing between the physical and moral sciences. The material
world is real, but our very knowledge of it is moral in the
largest sense. It is practical. It is a solving of problems in
the very proposing of which, and thus inevitably in their
solution, human needs and aspirations play a vital part.

When William James came to Chicago a short time after
Dewey's Studies were published, he spoke of the book
with a little too much modesty as "the foundation of the
philosophy of pragmatism." Dewey, equally modest, did
not know that he had been founding pragmatism, and was
greatly surprised when James greeted him in this way. A
case of " After you, Gaston!" not at all common among
philosophers or other human beings.

The other half of John Dewey reached its high point in
the founding of an elementary school, two years after he
came to Chicago. This school was regarded by him liter
ally as the laboratory of the department of philosophy, and

272 GREAT COMPANIONS

was called the Experimental or Laboratory School. But it
lives in history as the Dewey School, a name which might
well be written "Do-y School/* for "to learn by doing" was
one of its chief slogans. Its founder had the rather naive
notion that in its operation he was putting his instrumental
philosophy to an experimental test.

The revolt against Dewey's teachings these days is noth
ing to the clamor that was raised in 1 896 by the idea of a
laboratory school. "A school where they experiment with
the children imagine!" He could hardly have shocked the
parents of the nineties more if he had proposed vivisection
in a kindergarten. Even when closely examined, his idea
seemed to be to let children do just what they wanted to,
which was then generally regarded as equivalent to letting
them go to hell. Dewey was, indeed, somewhat Utopian in
his rebellion against the old puritanical pumping-in system
of education, summed up by his contemporary, Mr. Dooley,
in the remark that "it don't make much difference what
you study, so long as you don't like it." But he never did
believe in consecrating children's whims, much less in
forcing them to have more whims than is natural to them.
He had more horse sense than many of those who now run
"progressive schools" in his name. His idea was that life
in school ought to be enough like life outside so that an
interest in knowledge would arise in the child's mind as it
did in the mind of the race spontaneously. If you provide
a sufficient variety of activities, and there's enough knowl
edge lying around, and the teacher understands the natural
relation between knowledge and interested action, chil
dren can have fun getting educated and will love to go to
school. That is the kind of thing Dewey was saying. And

John Dewey: My Teacher and Friend 273

the little book, School and Society, in which he first said it,
was translated into dozens of languages, including those as
far away from home as Chinese and Japanese.

Dewey would never have started a Dewey School, how
ever, if it hadn't been for Alice Chipman. Dewey never
did anything, except think at least, it often looked that
way to Alice unless he got kicked into it. Nothing seemed
important to him but thinking. He was as complete an ex
trovert as ever lived, but the extroversion all took place
inside his head. Ideas were real objects to him, and they
were the only objects that engaged his passionate interest.
If he got hold of a new idea, he would sneak around the
house with it like a dog with a bone, glancing up with half
an eye at the unavoidable human beings and their chatter,
hoping they wouldn't bother him, and that's all. Only a
man of this temperament who nevertheless took human
lives and problems for his subject matter could have made
the contribution Dewey did.

Mrs. Dewey would grab Dewey 's ideas and grab him
and insist that something be done. She had herself a bril
liant mind and a far better gift of expression than his. And
she was a zealot. She was on fire to reform people as well as
ideas. She had an adoring admiration of his genius, but she
had also a female impatience of the cumbersome load of
ideological considerations he had to carry along when ar
riving at a decision. Her own decisions were swift, direct,
and harshly realistic not always aware of their grounds.
"You always come at things backhanded," she would say.
Dewey's view of his wife's influence is that she put "guts
and stuffing" into what had been with him mere intellec
tual conclusions. He also recalled that she taught him not

274 GREAT COMPANIONS

to be such an easy mark. He did not use that phrase. "She
liberated me," he said, "from certain sentimental moral-
isms of the 'judge not' variety, and taught me to respect my
adverse as well as my favorable intuitions." In short, she
kept pulling him down into the real world. And as his own
philosophy insisted that that is where a man ought to be,
he was, theoretically at least, always willing to be pulled.

Mrs. Dewey, then, as might be guessed, was the prin
cipal of the Dewey School. To her, and to Ella Flagg
Young, Chicago's famous superintendent of schools, be
longed most of the credit for its concrete operation. Dewey
called Ella Flagg Young "the wisest person about actual
schools I ever saw." "I would come over to her with these
abstract ideas of mine," he said, "and she would tell me
what they meant." Another woman memorable in this con
nection was Mrs. Charles R. Crane, wife of the bathroom-
fixture millionaire, who put up a large part of the money
for the school, and helped the Deweys raise the rest. Still
another was Mrs. Emmons Elaine, who, besides sharing
the enthusiasms of this little group of glowing reformers,
shared in the McCormick dollars. Those dollars aided very
considerably in the birth of the Dewey School, and it was
from being forced to swallow a million of them at one gulp
that the school rather suddenly died.

That sad story, which altered the direction and to some
extent the tone of Dewey's whole life, was a long time get
ting told. Mrs. Dewey wanted him to make a public state
ment at the time, but Dewey decided to swallow his
chagrin, and so everybody else, for some thirty-five years,
remained sitting decorously on the lid. The story in brief,

John Dewey: My Teacher and Friend 275

as it stood in Dewey* s memory when we discussed it, is
this:

Mrs. Elaine gave that million-dollar endowment orig
inally to another educational reformer, an educational
genius too, named Colonel Parker, who founded a school
with it called the Chicago Institute. Parker had more
genius for handling children than for handling dollars by
the million, and moreover, he soon began to lose his
health. With his consent, Mrs. Elaine finally proposed to
President Harper that Parker's school and Dewey's school
unite, and the endowment be turned over to the Univer
sity of Chicago. At that time the Dewey School was a flour
ishing institution with twenty-three teachers and one hun
dred and forty children; it had none of the troubles of the
Chicago Institute; its theoretical principles, while signif
icantly similar, were not the same and it had no need of
a million dollars. The change was therefore vigorously
resisted, and for one year staved off, by the parents of the
children in the Dewey School.

But Harper wanted that million dollars for the Univer
sity, and the following year, while Dewey was conveniently
absent in the East, he reopened the negotiations with Mrs.
Elaine. When Dewey returned, the merger was all but ac
complished. The president called him to his office and
spoke with unction about "their dream at last realized."
As Dewey had never dreamed this dream, but quite the
opposite, and as Harper had never put up any money for
the Laboratory School, he felt that he might have been
consulted before the realizing got quite so far along. The
interview was a tense one, and when President Harper

276 GREAT COMPANIONS

asked him to come in on the final negotiations, Dewey
abruptly refused.

"Since you've chosen to start this in my absence, I sug
gest that you finish it," he said. "After you get the terms
arranged, I will decide whether I can cooperate or not."

"I should hate to go to the trustees," Harper said, "and
tell them that your obstinacy had cost the University a
million dollars."

Dewey explained that he was interested in an experiment
in education, not in providing an endowment for the Uni
versity of Chicago. He also told President Harper al
though not in these terms, I am sure that if he did find
it possible to come in, he would expect a raise in salary
from five to seven thousand dollars. President Harper ex
pressed a fear that a salary of that size might embarrass him
with his colleagues, but Dewey thought he could survive
the pain. "That demand for more pay," Dewey remarked,
"did more to make a man of me than any other act of my
life."

Another stipulation Dewey made was that his teaching
staff, including Mrs. Dewey as principal, should continue
to serve in the new set up. Harper agreed to this when
talking to Dewey, but when talking to Mrs. Elaine, whose
main interest was in Colonel Parker's staff, he explained
that the arrangement was only for the first year. Mrs.
Dewey, in particular, he said, intended to resign as soon as
the school got going. This put him in rather a tight place,
but left him a year in which to wiggle out of it. His way
out was to wait until Dewey was again absent in the East,
and then send for Mrs. Dewey and inform her that Pro
fessor Dewey had told him she was going to resign.

John Dewey: My Teacher and Friend 277

As Dewey had never told her that, and, moreover, was
not in the habit of telling her what she was going to do,
she received this communication with a silence that Presi
dent Harper found vastly impressive.

"Mrs. Dewey," he told her husband when he returned,
"is a woman of extraordinary dignity!"

But Dewey had his back up now. He was aware that Mrs.
Dewey had, as an administrator, the faults of her virtues.
She was not a good mixer. She had an uncanny gift of
seeing through people who were faking, and made such
witty game of them that she alarmed even those who were
not faking or, at least, not faking very much. And she
had a kind of inside-out timidity, a fear of being presump
tuous, that because of her obvious superiority looked some
times like snooty coldness. She was, however, the sole chan
nel through which Dewey's ideas could naturally get down
into action. She was too deeply bound up with bringing
them down to be eased out as incidental to a "Dewey
School." Dewey surmised, besides, that his other trained
teachers would be eased out in the same sly fashion. Nom
inally he would be head of the school, but he would not be
in a position of control. He ended that interview with
President Harper, which was a hot one, by presenting his
resignation as professor of education. As soon as he got out
side the door he realized that Harper's expression on hear
ing this had been one of relief. He went home and wrote
out his resignation as professor of philosophy, psychology,
and education.

That was the end of the Dewey School, as the long
hushed-up story lived vividly in John Dewey *s mind. When
I asked him to let me tell it, he said at first:

27 GREAT COMPANIONS

"I don't like to do that now that Harper Is dead."

"If he's dead, it can't hurt him very much," I said.

"Well, if he were alive, he could answer."

"Somebody's going to tell it," I argued, "and if you don't
hurry up, you won't be able to answer either."

"Well, all right, go ahead," he said at last. "Mrs. Dewey
always said I made a mistake not to publish the whole thing
when it happened. She had more nerve and courage than I
have."

With the end of the Dewey School, there ended a joyful
and very affluent epoch in Dewey's life. Mrs. Dewey's sal
ary, together with the extras that he earned from books
and lectures, had raised the income of this "lay philos
opher" to heights never dreamed of in Charlotte, Vermont.
The family lived in two adjoining apartments and em
ployed two servants, a nurse, and a laundress on part time.
They had built a comfortable summer home in the Adiron-
dacks. Mrs. Dewey was not a neat or very thoughtful house
keeper not a brooding, maternal, or even a loving person.
She was, however, too intelligent to neglect the physical
essentials good food, good rugs and furniture, good
company. And she had been, on the whole, gay and easy to
live with, notwithstanding her underlying determination
to reform you if she got the chance. But this shabby and
yet tragic injustice to her husband's great ideas and her
own intense work for them a work that she felt was des
tined to change the foundations of social life forever
awoke an anger in her breast that never quite died down.

Dewey, of course, was not many days out of a job. Aside
from his rising fame in philosophy and education, he had
recently filled a term as president of the American Psycho-

John Dewey: My Teacher and Friend 279

logical Association. He could have had a chair in philos
ophy, psychology, or education in almost any university in
the country. It was, in fact, a psychologist, J. McKeen
Cattell, who took the initiative in getting him invited to
Columbia as Professor of Philosophy, and it was stipulated
in his contract that he continue to expound his views on
education at Teachers College.

Both he and Mrs. Dewey might have recovered with
more buoyance from the blow to their life work had not
Fate chosen this moment to repeat, so exactly as to suggest
deliberate malice, the tragedy of their previous personal
loss. On a trip to Europe in the interval between jobs,
their very gifted son, Gordon, died in Ireland, of ty
phoid fever. We have only Dewey's words for the rich
endowments of his baby, Morris, but Gordon had so im
pressed those around him that a service in his memory was
held at Hull House, in Chicago, and Jane Addams gave a
talk that is preserved in one of her books. Reading what
she said about this "tiny protagonist of his time,'* an "in
defatigable reader of the newspapers," a "fine and gallant
spirit," possessed of "wide and tolerant wisdom" and "a
sense of the humor of life," it is hard to believe that the
child was only eight years old. It makes plausible, notwith
standing the unscientific moisture in his eyes when Dewey
speaks about them, his own judgment of the phenomenal
gifts of these two children whom he lost.

In Italy the Deweys adopted the orphan boy, Sabino,
attempting in this common-sense way to fill the void in
their hearts. But Dewey never quite escaped the pain of
that double loss of his chosen life work and his best-loved
child. President Harper's action rankled in him so deeply

280 GREAT COMPANIONS

that, thirty-five years afterward, he expressed surprise on
finding that he could laugh at the man's crude way of
being astute.

In this, I suspect he was influenced by Mrs. Dewey, in
whom the wound was even deeper. Stricken thus as a
mother at the same time that she was deprived of any out
let for her violent zeal and genuine gift of leadership, she
fell gradually into a habit of resentment. She grew caustic
where she had been keen, captious where she had been
critical. Her health began to decline. She had already done
more work and borne more children than her physique,
unless sustained by joy, was equal to. The less she could do
herself, the more her perfectionism, her insistence upon
everybody's doing his best and doing it just exactly right,
turned into a vice of ironical nagging. Her husband's bland
way of going around with nothing on his mind but
thoughts, when she herself so longed for action, got on her
nerves. Increasingly until her death from arteriosclerosis
in 1927, these habits of perpetual objection became fixed
in her, giving a bitter flavor to her witty charm.

Notwithstanding the mood in which the change was
made, Dewey *s eastward migration at forty was a good
thing for him intellectually. He found a new group of
stimulating minds at Columbia. His philosophic friend
ship with George H. Mead, a teammate in developing the
philosophic implications of biology, was replaced by a
more argumentative friendship with Frederick J. E. Wood-
bridge, a philosopher of the classic mold. Dewey says that
he "learned a lot from Professor Woodbridge, but not what
he was teaching." He learned a lot also from James Harvey
Robinson, who used to begin his course in The Intellectual

John Dewey: My Teacher and Friend 281

History of Western Europe by remarking: "Now when I
mention God, I want the class to relax"; from Charles
Beard who was teaching American History with a similar
irreverence toward the founding fathers; and from Wesley
Mitchell, who was leading a like revolt against the "eco
nomic man."

In general, ideas were sprouting up through the bricks
at Columbia in those days, and Dewey's mind was happy
there. Also, he found it easier, while living in New York,
to play a part in civic movements of national scope, to be a
factor in the nation's political life, as is appropriate to a
philosopher who believes that the truth of an idea lies in
its practical effectiveness. By taking an apartment at the
corner of Broadway and s6th Street, a fourth-floor apart
ment fronting on both streets, he managed to surround
himself with enough noise so that he could get some think
ing done. He wanted to avoid academic abstraction, I sup
pose. He wanted to think about real things, and Broadway
street cars seemed as real as anything else. To one with sen
sitive eardrums, the place was hell itself.

Later, he moved out on Long Island, and preserved his
contact with reality by raising eggs and vegetables and sell
ing them to the neighbors. With characteristic vigor he
learned all about farming and actually earned money
enough during one year to "pay for his keep." His farm
was but a short walk from Walt Whitman's birthplace
where still the lilacs in the dooryard bloomed and like
Walt Whitman he loved the companionship of the humble
earth. He loved to identify himself with lowly people. He
was pleased when one day a hurry call came from a wealthy
neighbor for a dozen eggs, and the children being in school,

282 GREAT COMPANIONS

he himself took the eggs over in a basket. Going by force of
habit to the front door, he was told brusquely that deliv
eries were made at the rear. He trotted obediently around
to the back door, feeling both amused and happy. Some
time later, he was giving a talk to the women's club of the
neighborhood, and his wealthy customer, when he got up
to speak, exclaimed in a loud whisper:

"Why, that looks exactly like our egg man!"
Dewey looked like a young man then, a man just start
ing his career. He looked like the portraits of Robert Louis
Stevenson, having the same flat hair and dark mustache
and the same luminous eyes. Dewey's eyes were wells of
dark, almost black, tenderly intelligent light such as would
shine more appropriately out of a Saint Francis than a pro
fessor of logic. The rest of him was pleasant, but not quite
so impressive.

He used frequently to come into the class in Logical
Theory with his necktie out of contact with his collar, a
sock down around his ankle, or a pants leg caught up into
his gaiter. Once he came for a whole week with a large rent
in his coat sleeve which caused a flap of cloth to stick out
near the shoulder like a little cherub's wing. His hair al
ways looked as though he had combed it with a towel, and
being parted, if at all, in the middle, gave his face a rather
ewelike contour which emphasized the gentleness more
than the penetration in those wondrous eyes. He would
come in through a side door very promptly and with a
brisk step. The briskness would last until he reached his
chair, and then he would sag. With an elbow on the desk
he would rub his hand over his face, push back some
strands of his hair, and begin to purse his mouth and look

John Dewey: My Teacher and Friend 283

vaguely over the heads of the class and above the windows,
as though he thought he might find an idea up there along
the crack between the wall and the ceiling. He always
would find one. And then he would begin to talk, very
slowly and with little emphasis and long pauses, and fre
quent glances up there to see if he was getting it right.

He was thinking rather than lecturing, evolving a sys
tem of philosophy ex tempore, and taking his time about
it. The process was impersonal and rather unrelated to his
pupils until one of them would ask a question. Then
those glowing eyes would come down from the ceiling and
shine into that pupil, and drew out of him and his inno
cent question intellectual wonders such as the student
never imagined had their seeds in his brain or bosom.

Education does not, according to the Dewey system,
mean "drawing out/' But drawing out was never better
done than it was in his classrooms. John Dewey's instinc
tive and active deference, and unqualified giving of atten
tion to whatever anybody, no matter how dumb and hum
ble, might have had to say, was one of the rarest gifts or
accomplishments of genius. He embodied in his social
attitude, as Walt Whitman did in a book, the essence of
democracy.

Another trait of John Dewey's, very impressive in the
classroom and very little conveyed, I fear, in the above
paragraph was his personal dignity. Careless as his dress
used to be, he never seemed, as so many eccentric profes
sors do, inwardly sloppy. You felt his moral force. You felt
the rigorous self-discipline beneath his sagging manner.
You felt also, or soon found out, that with all his taste for
heresies John Dewey knew his trade. He was an expert

284 GREAT COMPANIONS

philosopher. He wrote a great many things that drove his
colleagues of the academic tradition wild, but he never
wrote anything that was amateurish, as did both James and
Schiller, his co-leaders in pragmatism. He had a prodigious
memory, and was a learned scholar as well as an unforget-
ful friend.

There was one act of learning, however, which Dewey
never performed and whose neglect was deeply regrettable.
He never studied, at least until his very last years, the phi
losophy of Karl Marx. While occupying for two genera
tions of young people the position of a leader in radical
democracy, and that in a period when Marxism was sweep
ing the militant majority of them into the anti-democratic,
or supposedly super-democratic, camp, he was content al
ways to say when the subject came up: "I have never read
Marx ... I cannot speak with authority on the subject."
He ought to have read Marx, and he ought to have spoken
on the subject not only with authority, but with vim. Marx
was his chief enemy, the only other man on the left who
backed a political program with a system of philosophy.

Once when Sidney Hook and I, two of his egotistical pu
pils, were waging an unseemly war over the question
whether Marx was a "scientific pragmatist/' I wrote Dewey
to know if he would preside at a debate between us on the
subject. His reply shows that he himself was not unaware
of a neglected duty:

Your idea is an ingenious and intriguing one. But the
trouble is I don't know enough Marx to go into the scheme
and I don't see the least probability of my getting the time
to acquire the needed knowledge. When I talk with you I

John Dewey: My Teacher and Friend 285

incline to think you must be right, and the same in
reverse when I talk to Sidney. This is doubtless a de
plorable confession but there it is.

Sincerely, if delinquency,

John Dewey

This delinquency made all the more harsh the parting
between John Dewey and his more intransigent pupils on
the subject of America's entrance into the First World
War. It was mainly Marx who backed them in their oppo
sition to the war, and Dewey supported the war without re
futing Marx. Those issues seem pale today when history
has refuted Marx, and when Dewey's central theme, "De
mocracy and Education," may be almost the slogan of a
third world war. But in those days there was bitter derision
of John Dewey in the heart of some of his most devoted
disciples eminent among them the gifted cripple, Ran
dolph Bourne. The crisis was momentous in Dewey's his
tory as well as theirs. He was not only alienated from them,
but somewhat from himself, I think, by his support of the
war against Germany. It was not that he felt, either then
or afterward, that he made a flatly wrong choice. But his
philosophy had not contemplated such a choice. Facts, in
forcing it upon him, proved more "brute" than he had
anticipated. He wrote a book on German Philosophy and
Politics which seemed to us then, at least a contribu
tion to the war propaganda rather than to the history of
thought. And he got into a state of tension that in most
people would have been an illness.

In this emergency he had recourse to a very unconven
tional physician named Matthias Alexander, who opened a

286 GREAT COMPANIONS

new chapter In his life. Dr. Alexander was an Australian
of original but uncultivated mind, attacked by the medical
profession, but possessed in Dewey's opinion of a valid
theory about posture and muscular control, and a tech
nique of "re-education" by which human beings were sup
posed to recover that integration of the organism which is
natural to animals. Dr. Alexander was endorsed by men as
brainy as Bernard Shaw and Aldous Huxley, and his sys
tem undoubtedly worked in Dewey's case. "I used to shuf
fle and sag/' he said. "Now, I hold myself up." Every one
of his friends endorsed that assertion. And when he added
that "a person gets old because he bends over," it was dif
ficult to argue with him, for he was obviously an expert on
not getting old. It was simply impossible to believe when
you saw him in 1940 that he had been around since 1859.
Dewey gave 90 percent of the credit for this to Dr. Alex
ander, 10 percent to a regular physician who taught him
to keep things moving through the alimentary canal.

The post-war period gave Dewey a chance to prove to his
radical critics that he had not turned into a "bourgeois
reactionary," and he proved it. When the smoke cleared,
he was found, unlike most of the pro-war liberals, to the
left of where he had been before. More accurately he was
found adhering to the most radical of his previously ex
pressed opinions. For as long ago as 1887 when on the
lips of a college professor it was a prodigy, if not a crime
John Dewey had said: "Democracy is not in reality what it
is in name until it is industrial as well as civil and po
litical."

Accordingly, Dewey was among the first of the American
liberals who made the pilgrimage to Soviet Russia not

John Dewey: My Teacher and Friend 287

then quite throttled by the totalitarian tyranny of Stalin
and he came back speaking bold words of praise for the
accomplishments, especially in education,, of the regime of
Lenin and Trotsky. This act placed him, if not among the
"radicals," at least at the extreme left of the liberals in
America, and again in a position of international leader
ship. He was invited by the new revolutionary government
of Turkey to go to Ankara and draw up a plan for the re
organization of the schools, which he did. And he was in
vited by the Chinese followers of Sun Yat-sen to give a
course of lectures at Peking University, which he also did
and further distinguished himself by declining, for dem
ocratic reasons, the decoration of the Order of the Rising
Sun offered him by the Imperial Government of Japan.
In those post-war years, Dewey also turned his thoughts
toward the understanding of art. He had no ear for music,
but he had a connoisseur's appreciation of painting. His
dwellings were decorated with taste, and you would always
find a rare picture or two on the walls. While in Paris in
1926, he attended an art class in the Louvre conducted by
Albert C. Barnes, famous as the first systematic collector of
"modern" French paintings. Ten years before that, Barnes
had attended one of Dewey's seminars at Columbia, at
tracted by a reading of Democracy and Education, which
he was heard to speak of as his bible, Dewey on his side re
garded Barnes as one of the finest minds he had known,
and the author of the wisest theory of aesthetics. Their
friendship was fruitful to them both, and Dewey was for a
time, at first formally and then informally, educational ad
viser to the Barnes Foundation. The two men differed so
"much in temperament that the friends of each sometimes

288 GREAT COMPANIONS

inquired what pleasure they could find in being together.
Dewey delighted to report that Barnes once replied to such
an inquiry: "Why, Dewey just comes along like my chauf
feur I can talk to him the way I can to a barkeep."

For a person who devoted his life largely to educating
other people, Dewey had a surprising lenience toward their
follies. Ascetic enough in his own personal conduct, his at
titude toward others was one of philosophic tolerance. His
favorite story was about a man who bought a secondhand
suit for two dollars and, finding moths in it, took it back to
the dealer with indignation. The dealer said: "What do
you expect for two dollars humming birds?" But this tol
erance could become, at times, a militant passion for the
rights of man.

Soon after Dewey came to Columbia as professor of phi
losophy, New York City was turned upside down by a scan
dal attending the visit of the great Russian writer, Maxim
Gorky. Gorky had come to solicit help for the Russian
revolution, and had brought with him his life companion,
or common-law wife, the actress, Madame Andreeva. It re
quired but a hint from the Tsar's officials to rouse the town
against him. He was denounced in screaming headlines as a
free-lover; hotels and private homes were closed in his face;
he was virtually thrown into the streets. Even Mark Twain,
although appealed to in the name of the republic of letters,
refused to stand against the public hysteria. He turned his
back with the rest. John Dewey offered his home, and the
shelter of his prestige, to the bewildered Russian. He in
turn was violently attacked for this act of magnanimity, so
violently that he seemed for a time in danger of losing his
job. Mrs. Dewey stood behind him like a rock. "I would

John Dewey: My Teacher and Friend 289

rather starve and see my children starve/* she said between
clenched teeth, "than have John sacrifice his principles."

In his subsequent championship of a fair trial for Leon
Trotsky on the treason charges made against him in Mo&-
cow, Dewey found no such support at home. The son and
daughter-in-law who made their home with him after the
marriage of his daughter Evelyn did all they could to dis
suade him from taking the chairmanship of the Commis
sion of Inquiry. He was too old for the journey to Mexico
he could not stand the discomfort and the change of food
he would probably be shot he would contract some fa
tal disease. Dewey smiled at these anxious warnings. "I'll
enjoy the trip/' he said.

When Trotsky was asked afterward for his impressions of
John Dewey, he said:

"Wonderful! He was the only man on the commission
who didn't get sick!"

Dewey was no figurehead on that commission. He was,
apart from the secretary, Suzanne La Follette, the one who
did the major part of the work. And his work included an
intense study of the Russian political situation in its his
toric development. He even went into its theoretical back
ground to the extent of being able to deliver at last an
authoritative judgment on the philosophy of Marxism, a
judgment more important than his verdict of "Not guilty"
in the case of Leon Trotsky: "Orthodox Marxism shares
with orthodox religionism, and with orthodox idealism,
the belief that human ends are interwoven with the very
texture and structure of existence a conception inherited
presumably from its Hegelian origin."

The Daily Worker, of course, described his behavior as

2$0 GREAT COMPANIONS

senile. The New Masses regretted that a great philosopher
had made a fool of himself in the sunset of his life a re
mark on which Dewey's comment was: "Twilight is the
usual expression/' In the opinion of his colleagues on the
commission Dewey conducted himself with the dignity of a
judge and the shrewdness of a Vermont horse trader. He
had answered his adverse critics in an essay written forty
years before: "Better it is for philosophy to err in active
participation in the living struggles and issues of its own
age and times than to maintain an immune monastic im
peccability." He did not answer them again.

The charge of senility looked a little foolish when he
published, almost simultaneously with the 800 page report
of the Dewey Commission, what may perhaps appear in his
tory as his major work, Logic, The Theory of Inquiry^ a
book of 546 pages. He wrote most of it in hot sunshine in
the backyard of his winter home in Key West, Florida,
stripped to the waist, and brown as an acorn. If you went
out there and asked him how his eyes could stand the white
glare on the paper, he would say: "Well, my eyes have al
ways been weak it's just a matter of getting them ac
customed to it."

Besides good health, this lay philosopher had rare good
luck in his declining years. He continued to buy his socks
at the five-and-ten, but not because he had to. His salary at
Columbia was raised to $7000 soon after he came there,
and in the booming twenties it was raised to $12,000.
When he retired in the early thirties, President Butler
called him "professor emeritus in residence" and kept on
paying him that $12,000. In 1940, however, Columbia de
cided to retrench, and Dewey had to fall back on his Car-

John Dewey: My Teacher and Friend 291

negie pension. He was accommodating himself to this with
his usual composure, when he received a letter from the
Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia stating that, if he
didn't mind, they would pay him a pension of $5000 a year
for the rest of his life. The news stunned him so that he
"acted funny" for two days, and wouldn't tell the family
why. But after a while he got adjusted to it.

Key West was a kind of winter-season Provincetown, a
mingling place of staid citizens of a sea-faring complexion
with transitory artists painting their pictures enlivened
too by a nightly rain of sailors from the naval station and a
springing up of painted tarts on the highways and byways.
John Dewey, dressed in brown sandals, white socks, a pair
of blue shorts and a blue shirt open at the neck, fitted into
this picture as though he had always been there. The artists
called him "John"; the staid citizens wanted to. They both
invited him to their cocktail parties, and he would drift in,
usually a little late, still in those blue shorts no matter how
dressed up the function was, and looking like a lad from
school. If there were any affectation in this it would have
been embarrassing, but Dewey always did exactly as he
damn pleased that is why he kept so young and he con
tinued to do it with a master's unconcern. A sailor coming
out of Sloppy Joe's one early morning stopped him on the
street and said:

"Say, Buddy, where's the brown-roofed house?"

"What do you mean by the brown-roofed house?" Dewey
asked.

"I mean it's late and I gotta get back to the ship, and I
want a whorehouse in a hurry."

"Oh!" Dewey said. "Well, I really don't know. I suppose

2Q2 GREAT COMPANIONS

perhaps I'm a little too old to be interested in such things."
The sailor gave him a large pat on the back.
"Hell, you're just a kid!" he said.

Dewey consisted so essentially, so much more than most *
men, o unexcited thoughts, and his thoughts had still so
long to live, that the remark seemed true. Even after
the wondrously vigorous heart of the man stopped beating,
it still seemed true.

There has arisen of late an extreme and intemperate re
action against John Dewey. It is due largely, I think, to the
follies committed by some of his wooden-minded yet flighty
followers in the name of "progressive education." They for
get how persistently Dewey returned to the thought that
his theories were experimental. Not only his educational
theories, however, but his instrumental philosophy is un
der attack by the zealots of this angry reaction. One emi
nent editor, wishing to sweep the whole thing out in a pile,
invented the term Deweyism, a word that of itself contra
dicts the whole meat and meaning of Dewey's teaching.
Even some more discerning minds of the "libertarian
conservative" persuasion seem to regard this mild philos
opher as the fountain-source not only of teen-age delin
quency, and a soul-destroying materialism, but of the
creeping socialism of the welfare state.

In my life, Dewey functioned as a stubborn and some
what fatherly opposition to my youthful impulse to take up
with socialist ideas.

"Society is not divided into two distinct classes, as the
socialists assert," he would say.

John Dewey: My Teacher and Friend

"Yes, but by acting on the hypothesis that it is, we can
split society in two/' I would answer. "What we need is a
working hypothesis, something to act on, instead of a lot of
vague ideas about how things might get better."

He was never in a hurry to answer such bright but in
cautious ideas. He would smile indulgently and rub his
chin and not say anything, but I could guess what he was
thinking. I was teaching logic out of Stanley Jevons' fa
mous book on The Principles of Science, and I was reck
lessly glib in transferring the conceptual apparatus of the
physical sciences to social and psychological problems
where the subject-matter is so much more mixed-up and
undelimited. Dewey had, it seems to me, an opposite fault:
he clung to the flux of fact with so much prudence that his
ideas lacked keen edges and his prose was apt to be vague
and hard to remember.

At any rate, he exercised as a teacher a cooling-down in
fluence on my revolutionary ardor. It was not until years
later, in the thirties, the Red Decade, when I was traveling
toward an opposite conclusion, that he came out for a ^so
cialized economy," and for "organized social control" as a
means of supporting "the liberty of individuals."* He was
then seventy-eight years old, and I think his life-influence,
taken as a whole, was in a contrary direction. He cared pri
marily about the liberty of individuals, and about democ
racy as conceived by idealistic Americans untouched by the
Marxian mystique.

Another mistake made by many of Dewey's conservative
critics is to imagine that his pragmatism, or instrumental

* Liberalism and Social Action, 1955.

294 GREAT COMPANIONS

philosophy as he preferred to call it, is a glorification of
America's tough-minded practicality as against the more
subtle values called "spiritual" with which other philoso
phies have concerned themselves. Pragmatism does, to be
sure, regard scientific method as a model of the method of
all valid knowledge, and if one's conservatism involves a re
jection of the authority of science, Dewey's instrumental
interpretation goes by the board with it. But the feat ac
complished by his interpretation is not to glorify, but to
mitigate, the tough or narrow practicality above all the
materialism of certain fanatic extroverts of what is called
scientism. Pragmatism builds the needs and aspirations of
man into the very process of acquiring knowledge, no mat
ter how objective, no matter how "scientific" it may be.
The meaning of an idea, according to pragmatism, is its re
sult in action, and the true idea is the idea that, acted
upon, leads to the result indicated in its meaning. William
James, in his famous lectures on Pragmatism (which, by the
way, I had the good fortune to attend), was naive enough to
infer that this justified a belief in God. If the truth is what
works, he said in effect, and it works to believe that God
exists, then it is true that God exists. Dewey was miles
away from this facile notion. He was, moreover, primarily
concerned with morals rather than with religion. His origi
nal motive, as we have seen, was not to glorify the authority
of material science, but to give moral judgments a similar
authority. It was, to employ once more the illuminating
terms invented by James, a "tender-minded" rather than a
"tough-minded" motive. Broadly enough interpreted, it re
mained an underlying motive in all his philosophizing,
finding its concentrated expression, if anything Dewey

John Dewey: My Teacher and Friend 295

wrote can be called concentrated, in a paper on "The Logi
cal Conditions of a Scientific Treatment of Morality/' to
be found in the Publications of the University of Chicago
for 1903.

I do not myself believe in the pragmatist definition of
truth, either in the mature and cogent form in which
Dewey elaborated it, or in the more naive manner in which
William James abandoned himself to it. But I think many
of its detractors on the so-called Right are making a total
mistake when they dismiss pragmatism as a philosophic at
tack on the values called "spiritual/* It would be truer to
say, although the terms are far from technical, that pragma
tism in all its forms is an effort to build spirituality into sci
ence.

On the subject of education as well as philosophy, I
think the reaction against John Dewey's theories has gone
beyond reasonable bounds. Undoubtedly there has grown
up under the aegis of "progressive education" a generation
of rude and ill-behaved youngsters, to whom a strict train
ing in the amenities of life, a course of implacable instruc
tion in reading, writing and arithmetic, and, when indi
cated, an occasional sound spanking, would be, or would
have been, an unmixed blessing. I think that an error, or a
tacit assumption that is erroneous, underlies Dewey's edu
cational theories which is to some extent responsible for
this. But his insistence that children can and should be in
terested in what they do in school, and that discipline
should be a demand that they carry through faithfully what
they have set out spontaneously to do, rather than that they
should do what some irrelevant ogre called "teacher" tells
them to do, was of immense benefit to civilization.

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"A person who is trained to consider his actions, to un
dertake them deliberately, is in so far forth disciplined/'
Dewey wrote in Democracy and Education. "Add to this
ability a power to endure in an intelligently chosen course
in face of distraction, confusion, and difficulty, and you
have the essence of discipline."

As a revolt against the previously prevailing notion that
certain "subjects/' in themselves "disciplinary," should be
rammed into the brains of children at all cost to their own
enterprise and adventure of living, this was a grand event.
Dewey was really a liberator of children throughout the
world, and as the quotation shows, liberating them did not
mean letting them run wild. He was profoundly concerned,
here as elsewhere, with morals. Just as in his philosophy he
wanted to combine moral authority with the authority of
science, so here he wanted to combine moral character and
conduct with freedom of choice for the individual.

The erroneous assumption underlying his theories, as it
seems to me, is that the spontaneous interests of the human
cub are to be regarded, by and large, as acceptable. They
are to be taken as the starting point of education. The idea
of training or disciplining the interests,, although it is one
of the first things that has to be done with a baby, does not
seem to find a place when the baby goes to a Dewey school.
One of the things modern biology has taught us, is that
none of our distinctively civilized attributes, either volun
tary or intellectual, are transmitted in heredity to our chil
dren. A certain selective breeding no doubt takes place
when men become civilized, but since no one has been able
to plot the direction of it, it can be assumed that the babies

John Dewey: My Teacher and Friend 297

born today do not differ on a large scale from those born
thousands of years ago. Nature is not interested in modern
improvements. A civilized human being is an artifact. To
make one out of the little savages we are at birth requires a
molding of the impulses, not just of the efforts we make to
fulfill them. Probably Dewey has discussed this point some
where and it has escaped my attention, but he failed, I feel
sure, to give it the emphasis I think it needs. He was car
ried away by the role his philosophy gave to human pur
poses, not only in the development of knowledge, but in
the very constitution of truth. I have recalled his saying to
me, speaking of the Dewey school in Chicago: "I was nai've
enough in those days to think of the school as an experi
mental test of my philosophy." Remembering that surpris
ing remark, I have fallen to wondering whether, without
being any more na'ive, I might not regard the excesses to
which the school has led as an experimental demonstration
of the error in his philosophy. They both give too high and
guiding a function to the offhand volitions of this, alas,
too animal human.

I trust this remark does not place me among the reaction
ary martinets, who want to abandon the definition of edu
cation as growth under favorable conditions, who resent
the world-rejoicing discovery that children can have fun
going to school it has rejuvenated the whole family from
grandpa down or begrudge John Dewey his place among
the immortal benefactors of the human race. Like most
daring innovators, he went to extremes; a period of reac
tion, a dimming of his world-wide fame, was inevitable;
but he will ride clear of that. And meanwhile those who

GREAT COMPANIONS

imagine they are dancing at the funeral of another wild
radical, will be surprised, if they open a book and read a
few lines actually written by him, to see how moderate
he was, how cautious, how bent on conserving as well as
multiplying the finest values of life in a free society.

My First Great Companion

was a Christian minister the first woman ordained
in the Congregational Church of New York State, and she
became the pastor of one of its large and famous churches.
She was of medium height, with light-brown hair and
green-blue eyes, a gently curving beauty both of face and
figure. She wore in the pulpit a simple black robe of her
own design which she called a surplice. It was pleated in
front and made feminine by a little black lace in the open
ing at her throat. Her manner in the pulpit was as simple
as her gown. She made few gestures, and never a motion
that was not native to her. She had the two indispensable
gifts of the orator, self-possession and a thrilling voice.
When she rose to speak, you knew at once that she was in
complete command of the situation, and you felt at ease. As

3OO GREAT COMPANIONS

there was nothing in the least degree mannish about her,
you stopped bothering about whether she was a man or a
woman. And when she began to speak, you were taken pos
session of, first by the tones of her voice, and then by the
surprisingly candid and wise and joyous, and often humor
ous, things that she would say.

She believed in joy. As a freshman at Oberlin she had
written a theme in which she advanced the theory that God
himself is joy a vast stream of joy surrounding all of us.
And she believed in growing. She believed that the essen
tial secret of a joyous life, no matter where you start from,
is to be forever in a state of growth. These two beliefs, or
instincts, comprise the essence of her teaching. They are at
least what most distinguished it from the usual messages of
those who put on black cloth as a mark of their profession.
What also made her unforgettable was the undying gallant
courage with which she carried into life whatever she be
lieved.

Her father, George Ford grandson of a Henry Ford
had been a gunsmith in Peoria, Illinois, and a big boss
around the house. He believed that woman's place is the
home, and proved it by getting drunk frequently and mak
ing the home hell. She grew up, perhaps in consequence,
with a quiet but firm belief that women ought to learn a
trade. She decided while still in high school and that was
in 1870 when such decisions were rare that she was going
to be economically independent. When Susan B. Anthony
came to lecture in Peoria, this ambitious high school girl
introduced the famous suffragette, and did it with so much
eloquence that, according to a clipping in my possession,
her speech was "the talk of the town." What George Ford

My First Great Companion 301

contributed to the talk on that occasion is not recorded.

At Oberlin, where she went to learn to teach, she fell in
love with a theological student just graduating. And like
many a feminist, she loved so hard that after one year of
college she gave up her own career and married him. They
settled in a parish in Canandaigua, near Rochester, New
York. There she kept house for him, bore him four chil
dren, and helped him with his sermons helped him al
most like magic, for she could write so fluently and fast.

He needed help, for he had been a soldier in the Civil
War and had come back with only one lung. When the
youngest child was still a baby, that lung seemed to be giv
ing out. He would come home after preaching, or even
after prayer meeting, pale with exhaustion, hardly able to
lift one knee after the other. When he gave up at last, he
was so weak that she had to write his resignation for him.
She found herself with five dependents and no means of
support.

Well she had always believed that women ought to do
something. They ought to be something besides wives and
mothers. Now Fate was saying: "Let's see you make good!"

There was a deserted church with a proud steeple but a
leaking roof in the village of Brookton, not far from
Ithaca. She persuaded the trustees to let her open the doors
one Sunday, and invite the people to worship. The whole
village came, of course, as they would to a side show to see
a freak. But they came again the next Sunday, and the Sun
day after that, for warmer reasons. Inside of a month the
roof was mended, and the parish was paying her twelve dol
lars a week for her Saturdays and Sundays. In a little while
she was called to a laiger church in West Bloomfield, which

32 GREAT COMPANIONS

provided her a commodious parsonage and a salary of eight
hundred dollars a year. By that time, however, the fame of
her eloquence was beginning to spread throughout all west
ern New York, and she added to her income by giving lec
tures and by marrying and burying people in the surround
ing towns. Although her knowledge of theology was only
what she had picked up by helping her husband with his
sermons, she had risen high enough in her profession by
1893 to be invited, from her little country parish, to ad
dress the World's Congress of Religions in Chicago.

All this was accomplished without the slightest affecta
tion of importance. Her sermons were so simply and di
rectly spoken from her heart to yours that she seemed to
have no art at all, but merely self-possession.

In one of them that she preached on "Children's Sun
day," she began by telling the congregation of the hard
time she had had finding a sermon. There seemed to be
nothing around the house or out in the garden, or in fact
anywhere in town. She finally went anxiously into the
country and started down an old road through the woods
looking for a sermon.

"I was walking very fast, and I know that the straight
lines between my eyes were very deep, when all of a sudden
I heard a voice. It was a slow, rather drawling voice, and it
said: 'Why don't you saunter?'

"It was the old road itself speaking.

" 'I am a worker; I have no time for dallying/ I replied.
And I quoted to the road a sentiment that had been
printed on a little plate I used to eat from when I was a
child: 'Dost thou love life? Then do not squander time.
There will be rest enough in the grave/

My First Great Companion 305

"The road laughed rudely, and said:

" 'I suppose you think there's nothing worth while in a
road but its end! That's where you and a lot of people get
fooled! Believe me, no road has any end; what you call its
end is only another beginning. . . .

" 'A lot of people in your church/ the road remarked,
'are so intent on getting to heaven that they haven't
time to be good on the way. I'm afraid they will be turned
back when they get there because they have no wedding
garments on. You have to get your wedding garment, your
immortality, as you go along, you know. If you do not find
love and joy and peace on the road, they will not be wait
ing for you at the end. . . .' "

That is the way she would preach.

"I could not help seeing that the old road was talking
sense/' she added, "and of course you can't help feeling re
spect for anybody who can quote Scripture correctly."

While still at Brookton she had been ordained by a min
isterial council headed by Thomas K. Beecher, a more radi
cal member of Henry Ward's family, who had established
an undenominational church at Elmira, New York. Mr.
Beecher was heretic enough to be proud rather than criti
cal of her rapid flight over theological education. He said
many times that she had preached the greatest sermons he
ever heard. He loved her and watched her career with a
father's pride. When his own strength began to fail he in
vited her, with the eager consent of his congregation, to
join him in the pastorate of the Park Church at Elmira.
She came with the understanding that her sick husband
should help with the parish work. He helped increasingly
and even soon began to do a share of the preaching. When

304 GREAT COMPANIONS

Mr. Beecher died in 1899, she and her husband were unani
mously elected joint pastors of the Park Church.

Such was her public career. It was distinguished enough
so that her name appeared in Who's Who in America.

My relation to her was a peculiar one: I was her youngest
son. From the age of six to nine, I was the child of a
woman who disappeared every Saturday and, after being a
preacher and pastor for two days, returned on Monday to
be my particular mother. To me at that time the arrange
ment seemed perfectly natural and all right. When some
young lad in the neighborhood announced that he was go
ing to be a minister, I piped up:

"You can't, you're a boy!"

I think many families would be happier if they didn't
stick so tight together. Half the fun of loving people is
having them come home after an absence.

Of course, my mother's energy was unusual, and I am
not laying down any rules, but life for us children was
richer and not poorer because of her public career. I never
felt any lack either of mother love, or good housekeeping,
or even of mending. I never saw a home that made me envi
ous. She was, as my sister said, "the kind of mother that
tucks you in and tells you a story, the kind that drags you
to the dentist to have your teeth straightened." Perhaps her
going away weekends put us on our mettle in a wholesome
way not unlike that adopted in the modern schools. She
would gather us on Saturday before she left, and tell us just
how to meet any contingencies that might arise. I faced the
situation, she used to tell me, with the imagination of an
engineer.

"What shall we do/' I said, "if a baby should be born?"

My First Great Companion 305

Later on, I found it a little painful to be marked out in
this peculiar way among boys. It's bad enough to be one
minister's son, let alone two! But what I suffered during
the smart phase, the phase of trying to be like everybody
else, was more than made up to me by her wise counsel in
the hours of real ambition.

"Be an individual," she wrote when I was away at school.
"Nothing you can gain will make up for the loss of your
self. Conformity with the crowd is beautiful until it in
volves a sacrifice of principle then it is disfiguring."

"Become interested in everything that is going on in the
world, and train yourself to think about it. It's better to
have your own thought, even if; it's a mistaken one, than to
be always repeating other people's."

"Life isn't really so hard when it is faced as when it is
evaded. Keep yourself in good physical condition, and
mind and soul will take care of themselves. Or is it just the
other way round? I am puzzled sometimes about it!"

"Hold your head high even if your heart is low and
look straight into everyone's face. It is much more impor
tant for you to stand up straight than to understand
Latin."

A letter she wrote to my sister Crystal, will suggest what
her life was like, and her character too.

Saturday evening
alone by the fire.

... I came home at half-past four, baked some sour-
milk graham bread, and Daddy and I fairly revelled in
it, it was so good hot with lots of butter on it. We had
nothing else but oatmeal.

306 GREAT COMPANIONS

I also baked apples so that our dinner tomorrow is all
ready.

I have mended a little and Daddy has gone to make a
call.

Oh yes, and I bought you the flannel for a kimona
Scotch flannel, soft, and it washes, they say. Maybe Julie
and I will make it. ...

Sunday, nearly 2 p.m.

I've preached and helped with the communion service
and I've lain down a long time. Now the soup and salad
and baked apples are ready when Dad comes in.

The musical numbers were awfully long and many.
I'm sure there was an extra one. I asked if the Offertory
couldn't be omitted because I knew I'd feel hurried, but
no, it couldn't, so just before I began, Mr. MacNaughton,
our fat tenor, got up and yelled to some angels ever bright
and fair to take him into their care. He yelled it over and
over again, but they never took a bit of notice so far as
I could see. The idea of an angel taking care of Mr. Mac
Naughton got on my mind so that I felt naughty when it
came time to preach. But I got thro' and the people
seemed happy.

My mother was wiser than the modern schools, for she
knew how to insert into a general diet of freedom an ade
quate dosage of discipline. One of her inventions was to
have "children's meals" when the grown-ups at table were
not allowed to talk. But these were offset by ' 'grown-ups'
meals/' and both regimes were vigorously enforced. The
child must have a chance to grow yes, but so also must the
parent, and neither one in self-importance. Moreover, our

My First Great Companion 307

household was run on feminist principles. In West Bloom-
field my sister took her turn at hoeing the garden and
cleaning out the stable for Merrilegs, a superannuated
racing mare that took my mother on her pastoral calls. And
my brother and I took turns at making beds and washing
dishes. In short, while my "individuality" was held ade
quately sacred, I was allowed from earliest years to know
that life consists largely of doing what you don't want to,
and for that privilege I am profoundly grateful.

My father you will have to believe this, too! was
something of a saint. Within the demands life made upon
him as a citizen, husband, parent, minister of the gospel, he
was unfailing in his goodness. But the Christian ideal, if
you really mean it, demands more of you than "life" does.
It demands that life itself, as we live it, shall be transcended
and superseded and changed. It is a Utopian ideal ethi
cally, at least, revolutionary. That is what zealots like Saint
Francis and George Fox and Tolstoy, and others so sin
cerely Christian that they had to renounce the existing
forms of Christianity, realized. And that my mother real
ized. In her simple and unself-conscious way, without zeal
otry for she had too much humor for that but with
perpetual inward struggle, she tried to live a life the core of
which was doing, and not just being, good. She adopted
one waif after another into our overcrowded and far from
prospering family took them in and brought them up
and educated them on a shoestring. I cannot remember a
time when there was not some boy or girl living in our
house because he had nowhere else to live.

And these were only the large chunks of her benevo
lence. She was always secretly putting herself through some

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discipline of sacrifice and generosity. I remember once,
during a period when, besides running the church, she was
cooking three meals a day and helping us children with the
dishes, a lonely old lady, who had been accustomed to ride
in from five miles in the country to hear her preach, was
stricken with paralysis and went blind. My mother got on a
street car and traveled out to see her. When she came back
she said:

"Max, Mrs. L - tells me that my sermons were the
only thing that gave her courage to live. She has absolutely
nothing left, you know. I told her I would come out every
week and read my sermon to her. I'll read her a novel too
that will do huer more good/*

I was old enough to be appalled. "Can't you send the ser
mon and let someone else read it to her?" I urged.

"You know that isn't what she wants/' my mother said.

As long as the woman lived, my mother would get on a
street car every Thursday afternoon and take that tiring
trip out into the country to read to her. No worry and no
weariness could deter her from this almost wanton regimen
of kindness, as to which no murmur either of complaint or
of complacence ever crossed her lips. It was to her a piti
fully tiny crystal drop contributed to the ocean of black
and cruel human relations that she felt called upon, as a
believing and yet clear-seeing Christian, to purify with
good deeds.

In a person shrouded in solemnity this goodness might
not seem so beautiful, but she carried a gay, unmasking hu
mor with her everywhere. One of her parishioners who be
lieved in spiritism once persuaded her to visit a medium.
It required a long walk, and when they arrived in the

My First Great Companion 309

seance chamber my mother sank rather eagerly into a com
fortable chair. The medium started forward in agitation:

"Oh, you mustn't take that chair George is sitting
there!"

"Well, I wish you'd ask him to move/' she said. "I'm
tired!"

She had an amused sensitivity to those distinctions of pe
cuniary caste which prevail in a democratic society, and the
minister's peculiar relation to them. She took five dollars
out of a lecture fee once, and firmly announced to the
family that, come what may, she was going to buy a silk um
brella.

"There's nothing in this world," she said, "that sustains
a woman when she walks along the street like knowing
she's carrying a silk umbrella."

I borrowed that umbrella one morning about a week
after it was purchased, and came back home at night with
out it. After retracing my steps and making every effort to
discover its hiding place, I had finally to bring her the sad
news that it was lost.

"Max, you have destroyed my sole claim to respecta
bility!" she said. "However, I knew all along it was a false
claim that silk umbrella never really belonged to me!"

People concerned with extending the boundaries of
kindness are rarely courageous about advancing the fron
tiers of knowledege. But my mother had that merit, too. In
stating publicly what her study and meditation led her to
accept privately as true, stating it without compromise or
qualification, she seemed to me heroic. Her rather pagan
belief in joy, and the right of everybody to have it, was dis
turbing to many a somber churchgoer, but she never pre-

310 GREAT COMPANIONS

tended to be any more churchly than she was. To someone
who complained about the poor attendance at prayer meet
ing she said:

"I wouldn't go to prayer meeting, if I weren't the minis
ter."

Her everlasting interest in growth, too her feeling that
the very will and bidding of Almighty God is that we keep
on growing led her to positions that sometimes alarmed
the aging pillars even of the very liberal church in which
she preached. Besides being undenominational, this Park
Church had been one of the first "institutional" churches
in the country certainly the first Temple of God with bil
liard tables and a theater in it. But still it clung to the old
creed handed down from the days of Jonathan Edwards.
My mother, keeping abreast of the most advanced Chris
tian opinion of her day, ceased to believe in this creed. She
felt that its elaborate details prevented that union of all in
the worship of God and the good life outlined by Jesus,
which to her was the real function of the church. She could
not keep this change hidden in her breast. At any risk, she
had to tell her true thoughts to her congregations. It is a
tribute to her diplomacy as well as her strength a diplo
macy that consisted largely of letting them think it was her
husband's idea that she changed this old-established and
very large church, the largest in Elmira, substantially from
Trinitarian to Unitarian without losing a member.

Although my mother had presided at so many funerals,
or perhaps for that reason, she did not believe in funerals,
and did not want one for herself. On the Sunday of the
week after she died we held a memorial meeting in the
church, and it was addressed among others, by Z. R. Brock-

My First Great Companion 311

way, for years the head of the Elmira Reformatory and one
of the pioneers of modern criminology. As a son's praise of
his mother is in the nature of things a little suspect, I want
to quote a few of his words. Testifying that of all his reli
gious teachers she had been the closest to his own thoughts,
he said:

"Annis Ford Eastman was brave possessed in full
measure the courage of her convictions but her bravery
was so mingled with gentleness, delicate considerateness,
and was so unpretentious that this characteristic did not al
ways appear upon the surface. She was hotly intolerant of
sham and consoling sophistries. At the same time, she was
most tolerant of honest difference. . . . Withal she was ex
traordinarily tactful, far beyond mere adroitness and fi
nesse."

And I will add these words, spoken by the Baptist minis
ter from across the Park:

"I may say here what I said in my own pulpit last Sunday
morning, that she was the only woman I ever knew who
took up public speaking that did not, by so doing, lose
something of that fine flavor of womanliness which is so at
tractive to us all. ... I do not mean simply that in every
thing that she said and did she was natural, sincere, and un
affected. I mean something more than that. I mean that in
herself she was natural according to God and according to
the harmonies of the universe. As I understand her theo
logical views I do not agree with them, but I do believe
that Mrs. Eastman was one of the choicest saints of
God. . . ."

As I sat there, bereft and yet proud of my heart's pos
session of her, it seemed to me that her rarest trait was that

5J12 GREAT COMPANIONS

one which she preached with the most eloquence un
ceasing growth. It seemed to me as though almost every
morning of my youth I had been lifted and launched anew
by some vividly conceived scheme she would propose for
making life a great thing. In this she never surrendered,
not one inch, to the advancing years.

Looking back over our correspondence, I realize that in
the very last twelve months of her life she did four things
having in them the boldness and the suppleness of youth.
She learned to preach without a manuscript; she learned
to swim; she consulted a psychoanalyst; and she decided to
leave the ministry, encouraging a movement set on foot to
make her dean of Barnard College. The psychoanalyst, Dr.
A. A. Brill, was the first in this country, and she was one of
his first patients. To him as to me to all who ever touched
her poised and humorous and dauntless spirit- -she was un
forgettable.

('untmued from front flap)

when Eastman met him in the "Con
vent of the Blue Nuns" in Rome.

CHARLIE CHAPLIN, on whose cre
ative and private life the author has a
word of calm judgment.

The long chapter on JOHN DEWEY
is not only a personal portrait, but the
story of Dewey's life and the develop
ment of his ideas as he himself related
them to the author.

The book closes with a tender
memoir of Max Eastman's mother,
ANNIS FORD EASTMAN, a famous woman
minister.

The Author

Max Eastman was born in the Congrega
tional parsonage in Canandaigua, New York.
After attending Mercersburg Academy, he
was graduated from Williams College and
then taught logic and philosophy for four
years at Columbia University. In 1913 he
published his first and most famous book,
Enjoyment of Poetry (now in its 23rd re
printing). He was one of the founders and
for five years the editor of The Masses, a
humorous, literary and artistic magazine, and
later founded The Liberator. His Enjoyment
of Laughter was a bestseller in 1936; the first
volume of his autobiography, Enjoyment of
Living, was successfully published in 1948.
Mr. Eastman is as well-known for his oratori
cal as his Hterar\ gifts, and throughout his
life has lectured on the various subjects
treated in his broks. His most recent publi
cations are Poent of Five Decades and Re
flections on the failure of Socialism.

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